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ralphtheninja / open-funding

A guide for researching ways of funding open source projects.
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continuous and instant funding (micro transactions) #12

Closed ralphtheninja closed 8 years ago

ralphtheninja commented 8 years ago

So I was thinking about these grants and they often come in batches, right? Say you have some team working on something for a year the cost would at least have to be food and roof over head for that team + some overhead and maybe a beer here and there. But why does it have to be in a batch? With e.g. crypto currencies it's a nobrainer to fund someone per day or per hour for that matter.

@nayafia was kind to add MOSS so I went to the homepage and noticed that they primarily fund projects that are "Projects Mozilla Relies On". All this with projects and applying for an award sounds like something from the 50s. Why can't it just be "a bugfix" or a smaller feature and get paid for that?

Being the case that MOSS relies on these projects (not a complete list, create an account and add more projects that you are aware of), what if developer X was working on NixOS, creates docker-images and fixes bugs for the WebRTC project? In theory this person could just hack away on whatever projects he/she is working on and get paid directly. A delivered patch to some project proves the work was done. You could sign your patches with your private key for authenticity.

Maybe I'm ranting but the way we fund things today - be it open source or not - just seems really old and dusty. We can do better.

ralphtheninja commented 8 years ago

After walking the dog and some more thoughts into this I realized that we are probably going to need traditional ways of funding as well, especially when it comes to starting new projects involving teams of people for longer periods of time.

That said, I still think there's plenty of room for alternative models to co-exist. Different funding models based on what type of work is being done. Micro transactions could suit well for maintenance type of work, smaller features and things like that, which obviously also is important work if you want projects to both take off and, continue to live on and evolve.

ralphtheninja commented 8 years ago

I just noticed that was the first issue on paying-the-piper https://github.com/pybee/paying-the-piper/issues/1 :)