TheWebTech
commented
5 years ago I've applied for access to the GitHub Sponsorship Beta.
Please let me know if you have any feedback at all.
If you apply to join the github sponsorship beta, if you are active in this repository we can discuss adding you to the list of contributors in the funding area to encourage sponsoring you.
As stated in the past OpenCollective is an option for a process/mechanism of donations.
I temporarily set up a Paypal donate link, and removed it to see how the feature works.
I didn't leave it in as It looks like the donations would be going right to just me and I think even if I had a page explaining it there would be a loss of trust in the donation process and I don't want to do that.
For now I encourage you to apply for the beta, as a community we'll have to come up with some way of determining who get's listed under the projects sponsorable people.
This list is only an encouragement to sponsor those individuals, it doesn't mean other contributors wouldn't be able to accept sponsorship, It just encourages money going to people the project feels are the main big contributors, or contributing the most valuable contributions.
Money divides people so I want you to know if you have any feedback on how money gets handled with this project I want you to voice it to me. I don't want this project to fall apart because someone didn't agree with a method of sponsorship that was chosen.
Completely just floating this idea. Not saying this is going to happen. I was thinking it might be good to have a way for companies to donate towards the project aside from just hours of development time.
CrankShaft’s money would be used to reimburse individuals or companies that spend a significant amount of time contributing. The intent not being that companies or individuals are to profit, but offset their costs. A business that has a full-time employee, if they dedicate say 6 hours in a week, that’s almost a full business day, that the employee was not doing billable work. The company still has to pay that employee. This also incentivizes development to some degree. If a company had a slow month, or an individual wanted to make side cash, they could by furthering the project.
Actual logistics of how donations would work, how sponsorships would work, how disbursements of money are approved, the fairness of the system, etc. all of those details can be figured out(There are tools like Open Collective for this). We could do "bounties" on issues, or something. But I don't want to discuss that stuff until hearing peoples views on the idea itself. At this time I'd just want to figure out what people think to see if it's worth researching and investing time into.
My inkling is that a sponsorships system could put real fire behind the project accelerating it more rapidly because time spent on it would not be viewed as “lost business time”.
An example of an open source project this has been hugely successful for is VueJS. Evan You quit his Job because donations for the project were enough to live off - he’s not rich but he’s living about the same life as he had with a real job(no I’m not planning to do that). Because of his ability to increase time spent on the project, there are now tons of spin-off projects he’s helping, and he’s also more able to project manage the whole thing. Now the real benefit is that third party devs have actually gone and spent full work days, and in one case a dev took a vacation from work, and dedicated days to working on Vue, and the Vue project was able to reimburse that time spent. Making it less of a risk or financial burden on the companies and individual contributors.
Then sponsors also benefit from having their name associated with the projects, example VueMastery has donated the most money to Vuejs, and are now the top place to learn VueJS.
If everyone hates the idea, that's totally okay It was just a thought I had after listening to some podcasts.
again lets focus this discussion on IF we should have something like this, not the specifics of how it would work, we'd settle that later.