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sobolevn / git-secret

:busts_in_silhouette: A bash-tool to store your private data inside a git repository.
https://sobolevn.me/git-secret/
MIT License
3.73k stars 198 forks source link

Sustainability #284

Closed sobolevn closed 5 years ago

sobolevn commented 5 years ago

This is a discussion place about how to make this project sustainable for a long period of time. Collaborators and people with experience in marketing / sustaining open-source projects are welcomed to the discussion.

I believe that every job should be fairly paid. And maintainers do a great job supporting and improving this package. Since, this project is fully open-source and does not generate profit of any kind I have decided to join several funding initiatives to help this project going.

Current ideas

Open Collective

We have joined Open Collective more than one year ago. And we have managed to receive our first and only 4$ donation.

SeedAndDew

A month ago https://www.seedanddew.com project reached me and offered their help in generating some profit. You can read more how they work on their website. TLDR: they sell subscriptions and then distribute these users' money based on project usage.

This might work I guess.

Other ideas

Patreon? Any other platforms? I don't have any experience on this 🙂

Profit distribution

There is an important question of how any potential profit should be distributed. My initial idea was:

We also need to find all the maintained packages of git-secret and reach to the ones who's maintaining them.

I was not able to find this very useful website where you can find all the information about a package on different OS. So, here are some distributions that are maintained:

Call for discussion

What do you think about it? Do you see any possible ways to achieve that?

cc maintainers @joshrabinowitz @simbo1905 @hurricanehrndz

joshrabinowitz commented 5 years ago

Sounds fine to me, let's give it a shot. I like the idea of tracking, promoting, and helping keep up-to-date all the git-secret packages too.

simbo1905 commented 5 years ago

I don't think its about the money. I think money complicates things. I think seeking to get money and then distributing it will have a negative effect. Community, shared purpose, the satisfaction of giving back, of making something useful, of building a tool that other use, is the motivation that drives opensource.

I don't have a problem with joint license or someone making money selling services based on what I help make. Yet even then I don't want any money from them, I don't want the overhead of thinking maybe I should spend a bit less time with my children and a bit more time on a feature, because I might get more money. For that reason, I don't want shares or options or anything else that makes contribiting ”work” not ”hobby”.

My vote is to end all money raising activities as a project. Move that activity to a company selling support that folks can join if they want to get paid, but please keep money out of the day-to-day workings of this project.

joshrabinowitz commented 5 years ago

Hm.

First of all, I think this is basically a moot topic because I don't think anyone is going to contribute money meaningfully to git-secret. Also, seems like the people who have put the most work into git-secret (as decided by sobolevn) should have the most say in this topic.

If there are avenues to get money to help pay for maintenance and development of git-secret, I don't think we should shut that off. It takes real effort and work to keep this project going. Conversely, I don't think anyone is going to add spurious features or code to git-secret to try to get funding from the project.

I think it's clear that git-secret support isn't going to be a big money maker for any company (not that it should be, but income from support is probably a non-starter)

Lastly I'm fine with most (or all) of the money going to @sobolevn, and if he wants to distribute some of git-secret's income, I'm fine with him deciding informally how that works, and I'm not worried that it will effect the day-to-day workings on this project.

Again, I think this is ultimately moot because I don't think there's going to be significant money generated to write/support git-secret, but I'm loathe to shut down the exercise just on principle.

To the issue of reaching out to all the maintainers, yeah, we should do that.

sobolevn commented 5 years ago

Ok, so let's sum things up:

  1. we should reach out to the packages maintainers
  2. we should hold off this "sustainability" topic, since none of us are really interested / knowing how to do that

Let's create a separate issue about package managers. And feel free to reopen this one if you come up with some new ideas.

Thanks for sharing your opinions! It means a lot to me!

joshrabinowitz commented 5 years ago

I sort of said the opposite of what you say in 2). But I defer to your decision.