Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

1

Open Collective

Why not just have an intermediate company that handles the donation/support aspects? I mean, we already have Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/ and for other content creators the likes of Patreon also work out nicely. Why would large enterprises not just use a tool like that, if they already use the likes of AWS or other IaaS/PaaS/SaaS offerings? But I definitely agree that a lot of open source is underfunded and as a consequence many can't work on it full time or even every day, because things are dire financially otherwise: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html Not everyone has cushy jobs that make them $100k a year, I make closer to $21k in Europe now, about which I wrote on my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings It feels to me that perhaps the solution here is to have something like a bot on GitHub/GitLab, that adds a comment to issues: "If you'd like to express to the maintainers how important this issue is and draw more attention to it, then submit a payment here: ... Payments so far: ... (possibly with messages by supporters)" Most people don't care about Open Collective or GitHub Sponsors or whatever, they just want to make feature requests or bug reports. If their attention is captured and the ability to make their own request/report more visible is offered to them as a part of that process, maybe things would be a bit better? I've definitely heard the sentiment expressed that micropayments have the potential to improve how we interact with others on the web in some ways, I'm just not sure how viable that is.

#Crowdfunding #Fundraising And Donation Management #Online Payments 72 social mentions

2

Oh My Zsh

#Developer Tools #Programming #Terminal 58 social mentions

3

Medium

Here's something I wrote in 2018 that could basically be the exact same thing written today: https://medium.com/@paulbiggar/how-to-fund-open-source-8790e42e10fe.

#Blogging #Blogging Platform #CMS 2186 social mentions

For BIRD Internet Routing Deamon, we solved financing issue by offering support contracts ( https://bird.network.cz/?support ). If you develop free software that is mission-critical for some companies, then it makes sense for such companies to pay for support both to get developed features they need and to ensure there is someone to help them if something unexpected happens. Even in cases where no real support is needed and the contract is de-facto sponsoring, I guess for many corporations it may be more acceptable to bill it as support.

#Transportation #Vehicle Rental Software #Perimeter Security And Firewalls 13 social mentions