@jacob yea and the GitHub sponsors are always empty,...

@jacob yea and the GitHub sponsors are always empty, people think the donation or nonprofit model is better but don’t really think about the costs involved in governance and administrative tasks. Tbh they just don’t want capitalism but don’t want to go that far either.

Like 11 February at 18:13 | Wall-to-wall | Open on hachyderm.io

11 comments

Glyph

@cam @jacob also, not for nothing, they don't donate

11 February at 18:22 | Open on mastodon.social

Camilo

@glyph @jacob yea that’s what I mean, the GitHub sponsors are empty. I know I don’t donate to every open source project I use or even the ones I depend on.

11 February at 18:23 | Open on hachyderm.io

Glyph

@cam @jacob it's a weird sort of circular thing. I actually kind of have a policy of *not* donating to open source, because I have given a LOT of my life to the "community", and I feel like a personal boundary for me is that I am not going to make my personal donations to what are, let's be honest, corporate development teams be a _cost center_ in my personal life. and I've mostly succeeded, please do not look at my domain name registration bills.

11 February at 18:25 | Open on mastodon.social

Glyph

@cam @jacob but also, I am not entirely certain my moral calculus is correct here. I've given a lot but I've gotten a lot too. Am I net negative or net positive on my community contributions? Hard to say. But I have more or less given up on getting corporate sponsors, individuals are the only ones who can recognize the aesthetic merits of open source approaches.

11 February at 18:27 | Open on mastodon.social

that one JNL

@glyph
my take on this, from a denominational funder who changed my perspective re: paying for what pays me- if you don't sustain the things closest to your heart, no one else is going to do it for you, and the more niche the thing is, the more it has to be you, if it's YOUR niche. Tons of people will give to NPR. Only Unitarian Universalists will support UU and its institutions. Different field, obviously, and YMMV.

11 February at 19:35 | Open on zirk.us

Daniel Lakeland

@jordinn
This is exactly my take as well, I fund Julialang, Keepass2Android, Signal, OpenWrt and a few others with small monthly donations because they're super important to me and I don't want a world where they stopped existing because there wasn't enough money coming in.

I'd like a foundation that takes one payment in and then makes proportional payments out to as many projects as I set up. I suspect more people would do this if it were easy.
@glyph

12 February at 4:50 | Open on mastodon.sdf.org

Natasha Nox 🇺🇦🇵🇸

@cam @jacob Some people don't realize it's not capitalism they hate but a liberal market and money as a whole without offering or supporting an alternative idea…

11 February at 19:59 | Open on chaos.social

Emme Ci 🍉

@cam @jacob I think a better open funding model is sponsor foundations or cooperatives.

They should adopt #FOSS projects and deal with the hassle of asking for donations or applying for big grants.

The reason I like the model is that, ideally, I can pick one and offload to them the cognitive load of picking projects and splitting the money amongst them them. Hopefully they would build for themselves a trusty reputation

11 February at 20:23 | Open on freeradical.zone

Camilo

@muzzle @jacob right but then people have a tendency to complain a lot about how the foundations are run, or that they take corporate money and thus corporate priorities, and ofc there's the general nonprofit problem of whether or not they perpetuate the problem they attempt to solve

11 February at 21:36 | Open on hachyderm.io

Emme Ci 🍉

@cam @jacob that's why I was thinking about a cooperative. When you donate you become a member (say, for one year) and you get voting rights over what the coop should do with its money, and where it should go looking for additional funding.

12 February at 6:28 | Open on freeradical.zone

Matti Järvinen

@cam @jacob also it's not lawful in every country to receive donations without physical reward like expensive stickers or something.

Things like this make donations very complicated.

12 February at 4:44 | Open on mastodon.social