
Recap of the `funding` experiment - feross
https://feross.org/funding-experiment-recap/
======
fergie
It makes me sad to see the negativity that this experiment has attracted, even
in this HN discussion thread there seem to be a lot of dismissive and
patronising comments directed towards Feross.

I'm genuinely unsure if this is because people think that Feross has much
lower ability than he actually has, or if they are jealous of the attention he
has received for Standard.js, or if it is just because JS programmers are
still looked down upon.

Either way we are talking about somebody with a pretty impressive CV who has
made countless meaningful contributions to Open Source. Personally I think the
work that he has done around WebTorrent is amazing, and WebTorrents may even
end up saving humanity by making it possible to recentralise the web (only
slight hyperbole, and if they dont, it will be something very similar).

Its true that Open Source is now an industry that generates billions if not
trillions of dollars a year, yet very little of that makes its way to the
people who actually make the stuff. Feross is right to explore ways to pay OS
maintainers, even if those attempts sometimes fail. We will all be better off
for it.

~~~
lacker
The negativity is because people do not want to see this becoming a trend,
where CLI tools start advertising. One practical way to fight against new
forms of advertising is to complain in public, complain to the advertiser, and
make sure that form of advertising is associated with user complaints. That
seemed to work here.

I don’t think the majority of the pushback was about Feross personally. But
when people see a new form of advertising that seems especially annoying, it
is quite logical to respond negatively.

~~~
mrosett
The feedback on HN was harsh but not personal. The 1k comment thread on
/r/programming was very nasty and made me less likely to engage with that
community again.

~~~
fergie
Just took a look at the Reddit thread in question ->
[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cus0zu/a_3mil_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cus0zu/a_3mil_downloads_per_month_javascript_library/)

Not good.

------
wakeywakeywakey
Some suggestions that may see future attempts better received:

1\. Try it on a repo with more substance. There were many comments about this
project being a light wrapper around eslint config. It may be popular in
GitHub stars, but intuition tells me the type of dev who installs a dependency
to generate a JSON file is not the type to want to pay for anything; they're
looking for a quick `npm install free-solution` for everything.

2\. Don't focus on ads, specifically. Anecdotally, devs I know are very
sensitive to ads/privacy, much more so than to paying money. Despite your good
intentions, your ads will involve analytics/tracking, which you ultimately
can't control.

3\. Your various posts and web profiles eagerly mention how many downloads you
have. The numbers are great. But, it comes across as your primary focus.
Here's a test you can use to see if you are truly creating value: stop pushing
code. When people start begging for updates, I suspect you will have more
success with git bounties than ads.

~~~
feross
> devs I know are very sensitive to ads/privacy, much more so than to paying
> money

In case it's not clear to other readers: `funding` had no tracking, no data
collection, and no code from untrusted third parties. It was a `console.log`
with some fancy formatting.

> Despite your good intentions, your ads will involve analytics/tracking,
> which you ultimately can't control

They certainly would _not_. I was very clear to the sponsors that there would
be no analytics. I even took pains to ensure only plain ASCII (excluding
control characters) could be printed out.
[https://github.com/feross/funding/blob/58b090c51ce94de32107d...](https://github.com/feross/funding/blob/58b090c51ce94de32107dd8ecb7fe4f75053449d/lib/check.js#L1-L19)

~~~
quantummkv
> In case it's not clear to other readers: `funding` had no tracking, no data
> collection, and no code from untrusted third parties. It was a `console.log`
> with some fancy formatting.

The same was said about the early banner ads, early popup ads, early..... Well
I think you get the point.

> They certainly would not. I was very clear to the sponsors that there would
> be no analytics.

The real danger is not that you are untrustworthy to uphold this on your
packages. The real danger here is the normalisation of this behaviour. You
might not add tracking. But once the big advertisers jump, they will want
analytics. How much time would it take for a fork with tracking to appear? And
thanks to the incentives and pressures, this will overtake and become the
standard, as it happened across the web.

You might not do it, but there is no guarantee others will not. It's best to
not keep the temptation there.

------
danShumway
I'm in the early stages of building some tools to automatically lock new
issues in my own Open Source repos, and to give Patreon supporters automatic
access to comment on locked issues. Anyone will be able to read existing
Github/Gitlab issues, but only supporters will be able to join the
conversation or file new issues. It's loosely based on some ideas that William
Gross[0] and a few other sources have proposed.

You're on Patreon, but most of the experiments you've run so far are around
traditional sponsorship, ads, and donations. Is there an ethical/logistical
reason you've mostly stuck to that path, or is that just the stuff you've
happened to try so far?

This is still in the experimental stages for me, but if I built this in a way
that other people could use, I'm curious about whether anyone else would be
interested in trying it out -- or if the potential to suppress community
involvement is part of the reason why developers have steered away from
strategies like this.

[0]: [http://wgross.net/essays/give-away-your-code-but-never-
your-...](http://wgross.net/essays/give-away-your-code-but-never-your-time)

~~~
justsubmit
That attitude is very strange to me.

I care about the quality and usefulness of my software. I give it away to give
back, because I have been given much.

There are bugs in my software which I will never discover on my own. When a
user offers me a bug report or a patch, that user is also giving back. The bug
report is a form of contribution. It gives me information I wouldn't otherwise
have, which I can use to improve my software, which can make it more reliable
and useful to others.

Most users who encounter a bug don't take the time to report it. Those who do
report bugs contribute their time and effort, and the fruits of their
contributions help not only myself, but other users of the software.

This applies not only to bug reports, but to suggestions and feature requests
as well, because all of them can help make the software more useful to others.

The only interaction that has negative value is to be asked a question that's
already answered in the documentation. But even those can be valuable when
they indicate a weakness in the documentation that makes the information hard
to find or understand, which can be improved, which helps other users. And
even the questions which are trivially answered by the documentation can lead
to valuable interactions later.

So to charge a user for the privilege of interacting with me would be like
asking the user to pay me for the privilege of helping me, for the privilege
of giving back. It would be rude, and it would deny many the privilege of
contributing through the means at their disposal. It would almost be like
keeping a fellow human being in a kind of moral debt, rejecting their
contributions out-of-hand, leaving them obliged, with no means to repay (or to
"pay it forward").

~~~
juliusmusseau
Monetizing our work is not strange. It might require some contortions compared
to the most direct approach (step 1. write software. step 2. git push), but
that doesn't make it a bad thing.

Here is Charles Dickens writing about his own contortions to monetize his
work:

 _There must be a special design to overcome that specially trying mode of
publication, and I cannot better express the difficulty and labour of it than
by asking you to turn over any two weekly numbers of "A Tale of Two Cities,"
or "Great Expectations," [...] Notice how patiently and expressly the
[serialized novel] has to be planned for presentation in fragments, and yet
for afterwards fusing together as an uninterrupted whole._

I think holding onto bugfixes and feature enhancements and letting Patreon
subscribers have first dibs on these makes sense.

~~~
pessimizer
> Monetizing our work is not strange. It might require some contortions
> compared to the most direct approach (step 1. write software. step 2. git
> push), but that doesn't make it a bad thing.

You're answering the question you want to answer, not the one that was asked.
It's important that you get paid for your work so you can eat, and it's good
to figure out ways to monetize your work. Charging people for reporting bugs
is strange because knowing about bugs helps you and the rest of your users
more than it helps the reporter.

> I think holding onto bugfixes and feature enhancements and letting Patreon
> subscribers have first dibs on these makes sense.

I think that could make sense, too, but neither of those things are reporting
bugs or suggesting features. I don't have a quote.

------
gvkhna
Thank you for this in depth discussion about sponsoring open source. I think
there aren’t great solutions out there and it was definitely worth trying
something new.

I remember reading the original post proposing this concept.

Is it possible the system is working fine as-is and has been for decades?
Although maintainers do not get great funding, the community is constantly
proposing new solutions, improving standards and disseminating breakthroughs.

If companies were all privately building their own stacks, then they would all
maintain their IP as a competitive advantage but won’t be able to share common
solutions that they could feasibly replicate as well given time and direction.
Only by everyone contributing do we have such a great community.

Unfortunately companies that sit on top of open source code don’t derive all
of their value from just the code, although it’s definitely a part of it. They
provide usually more than just a technology implementation, including support
staff, communication strategy and so on that their stack doesn’t provide them.

I wish more maintainers were better funded, it could definitely help but I
think also it’s amazing to see what we’ve collectively been able to accomplish
so quickly by people contributing for free and permissively for the general
good.

~~~
netsensei
I suppose the entire point of open sourcing software is to take a step back
from generating revenue through IP.

That doesn't exclude charging for the hours one put in solving specific issues
or requests raised by third parties.

Open source only provides a legal framework that defines the terms by which
one distributes code. It was never intended to be a business model in the
first place. Not does the entire concept claim to be a business model.

As such, all software projects being equal, choosing a permissive or
proprietary license is just a fork in the road.

The bigger picture here is the intent and motivation of developers that drives
them to build software and share it with the world. Sadly, the hard truth is
that there's no such thing as a free lunch. If you provide the output and the
labour for free, discussing that such efforts are unsustainable is a bit of a
cognitive dissonance on the part of the maintainers.

It's totally valid to write code, release it for free and then charge users
for the maintenance of the tool. That is, put a figure to issues and only
solve them as a maintainer when enough users care to chip in the hard currency
to cover the time.

Sure, many FOSS maintainers don't do it for the money. They simply want to
have a positive impact on the world. Share something cool with the world.
Assert their identity as the author of their own creative vision. But if
history teaches anything, great artists have always walked this tight rope
between covering living costs through patronage and finding freedom and
artistic license to actualise their own vision.

------
toupeira
Even though I don't like ads either, I think this experiment was a glorious
failure which will lead too much learning. That was supposed to be a
compliment :)

I'm not sure if GitHub Sponsors is already planning this, but since they also
track dependencies they could automatically distribute a part of the donations
to all the transitive dependencies.

Also, I agree with others that Open Source by itself is not a business model.
It's inherently altruistic, so self-sacrifice is a given and if you want to
get paid, the best solution IMHO is to support companies who support FOSS by
working for them (or founding one yourself). And while of course not everyone
has that privilege, we collectively do have a lot of power to influence the
job market and donation platforms:

\- If you're currently interviewing, make it a point to ask about this.

\- If you're currently employed, ask around what your company is sponsoring,
or organize an effort to start doing so with a group of like-minded people.

\- And lastly, if you're making a shitton of money, donate to the software you
use in your private life.

------
marknadal
I'm a maintainer of a 10K+ starred project with 1M+ monthly downloads and I
know Feross personally.

I do not agree or support this movement.

Don't do Open Source if you can't afford it.

It is as simple as that.

Framing it as exploitation is misses the point of collaboration.

It has never been about us, it's been about giving value to the world.

We can't play the victim card. Nobody wants a whining Batman or Spiderman.

So what is Open Source about?

Here's an excellent talk on the psychology behind it:

[https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc](https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc)

~~~
lazypenguin
I'm surprised nobody else has said this as well. If you want to get paid for
your time or your projects then stop giving them away for free? Nobody is
under any obligation to work on open source so it's peculiar that someone who
chooses to do so would then complain afterwards...just stop working on it...

~~~
q3k
> Nobody is under any obligation to work on open source so it's peculiar that
> someone who chooses to do so would then complain afterwards..

Except more and more employers judge job candidates per their open source
projects and contributions. It can create a positive feedback loop, where only
people who can afford to work on open source projects do so, and thus get
better offers in the future. While people who can't afford it will never be
able to break through recruitment because of a mostly empty github profile.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
A perspective which may not have been considered yet is exactly what kind of
value is being created in these open source projects: namely, value which is
easily captured by SaaS startups. Is it really surprising that that <insert
javascript library> is used by <insert techbro startup> to make <insert
obscene valuation> without giving anything back?

End-user open source software doesn't face this problem as often and I would
wager is a lot more important for creating an open source ecosystem which
serves people rather than serving techbro startups. I'm not saying that
libraries are unimportant, but rather that there's not a lot of use-cases for
JavaScript layout library #1,480 other than making some web app for some
techbro startup, which is pretty far removed from anything useful to end-
source. If you write projects which enslave yourself to techbro startups,
don't be surprised when you end up enslaved by techbro startups.

------
jchw
While this experiment was interesting, I think it was doomed from the get go.

One of the problems with advertising is that it works a lot off of a novelty
factor. Like, you can come up with a new technique, and for a brief moment in
time this new technique of advertising may be effective. Think popup ads, or
those annoying newsletter popups, etc etc etc. But then everyone does it,
people start ignoring it, and it becomes immediate noise.

The trouble is, why wouldn't _anyone_ `npm install funding`? Soon npm install
would have to block the ads just so its own user experience wouldn't be
absolutely demolished. This idea simply wouldn't have scaled.

I love open source and I contribute as much as I can, and have definitely been
a long time user and supporter, longer than I've worked in software
professionally for sure, but along with all of the "Open source is not about
you" points that were brought up, there is one point that may hurt but is
nonetheless equally true: You are not entitled to make a living off of open
source. There is no reason this would be guaranteed to be possible. It would
be nice to live in a world like that, but if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
I'm not for solutions that will just deteriorate open source as I think it is
much more valuable to society than just a way to make money, to basically all
parties involved. I sympathize with people who pour hours of unpaid work into
it, but when you donate your time and effort into something, you don't
necessarily get anything in return, much like giving gifts to someone you
love.

If you need to make a living, you can always sell software, or work for
someone else. There's still opportunities to contribute to open source in both
of those cases. I would love to see a detailed breakdown is between open
source work that's donated versus funded by companies to understand what the
open source community really is; I think it would help our understanding about
how open source gets funded _today_.

Of course, though, it is absolutely people's right to do what they wish with
their own projects, and I do wish everyone luck in finding a good way to make
contributing to open source more sustainable as a source of income.

------
jhunter1016
I worked for a company that used tons of open source software. The company
itself never paid or contributed. Fortunately, individual developers on the
team often built open source tools and contributed to other open source
projects.

This issue of getting paid for the work you do hits home for me. I come from a
writing background (before development), and the problem is very similar
there. You're expected to write for free. For exposure. To better the
community. But it sucks. People should be paid for the work they do.

Good luck on future experiments.

------
riffraff
> Right now, the status quo is that maintainers create massive amounts of
> value and then for-profit companies and SaaS startups capture almost all of
> it.

it's almost like we'd need a license that allows free users and restricts
people who profit, or dual licensing. We've had those for a while, haven't we?

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
The projects would be immensely less valued, less used, and less popular if
restricted to non-commercial use. Can you name me a single NPM module that
limits to non-commerical use that would be widely known within the JavaScript
community? ...Maybe GSAP?

~~~
k__
Somehow this sounds to me like saying "Don't charge what you're worth to the
company or they won't hire you!"

------
ohazi
I think there were two problems here.

1\. You hit a nerve with the distribution method. Everybody knows that npm is
a ticking time bomb for malware delivery. Developers already tend to react
poorly when weird things happen to their build system, and the paranoia around
npm made them react explosively.

2\. I think targeting developers is probably the wrong approach. If you're
serious about tackling this problem, you should find a way target executives,
marketing, or developer relations people at companies that use the open-source
packages in question, and give them ways to support the project in an official
capacity.

For example, give projects a standard way to offer 1-3 top-tier sponsorship
spots, and 5-10 second-tier spots. Create an easy way for companies to bid for
these spots across a handful of open-source projects that they use and like.
The companies that pay $10-20k for a booth at the Open Source Summit
conference will absolutely eat this up.

~~~
mrosett
Re: 2 - he already does that.

------
thosakwe
I said something similar on a previous post, but more and more, it’s becoming
more clear to that “open source” and “profit” are not very compatible.

The truth is simple: if you use a permissive license like MIT, you will
probably never see a penny from the _thousands_ of hours you put in, and while
you are struggling and feeling drained, people who will never contribute more
than a vague “it doesn’t work” GitHub issue are making tremendous profit on
your back. The only way to prevent that (at least, that I know of), is using
copyleft licenses like GPL, LGPL, etc.

I don’t find many compelling reasons to make anything other than command-line
tools open source at this point, and even then, they’d all be GPL. For me, if
someone could potentially profit from the work, it makes more sense to simply
charge for it. That’s still an option, and we shouldn’t forget it.

~~~
lacker
Some open source projects are quite profitable. Bitcoin for example is an open
source project.

There are also many people paid to work on open source. Projects like
TypeScript or TensorFlow are good examples.

It just doesn’t work well to first write an open source library, give it away
for free, and then later try to make money from it.

------
JMTQp8lwXL
I applaud your effort. It did raise about quite a bit of unproductive
discussion, but there were so many things worth discussing: how funding should
happen, the privacy concerns surrounding the proposed format, etc. Though this
model didn't quite work, it doesn't mean there aren't undiscovered models
waiting out there -- or that there can't be an ongoing discussion about how to
improve.

I did want to discuss this sentence from the article. Since it was in bold, it
seems worthy of unpacking it a bit.

> Right now, the status quo is that maintainers create massive amounts of
> value and then for-profit companies and SaaS startups capture almost all of
> it.

The thing is though, nobody would pay for a service that just left pads.
People compose open source projects into novel ways to solve customer
problems. A customer problem isn't: "I need to sort this array n log n
efficiency". A customer problem might be: "I need to find my most recently
updated accounts, and generate a report". To state this in other words:
startups create value through their novel use of open source packages,
combined in a way to solve a problem painful enough for other people to pay
for.

If left pad was that hard to do, people would certainly pay for left pad as a
service. But individual open source packages provide minimal economic value.
It's how they are combined that creates value. And I think that's what makes
it difficult to extract value from individual repositories.

If your primary objective is value extraction --which is totally fine, by the
way, many people are coding for paychecks-- why not do it for a company? You
clearly have so much skill and would undoubtedly be paid well. There's many
remote companies these days, it'd give you the lifestyle you want-- the
freedom to travel, etc. It's not as free as being able to say, "I want to work
on X and Y and Z open source packages", but it isn't all that terrible. My
company gives me bandwidth to contribute to OSS during working hours, too. I
think wanting the freedom to 100% control what you work on inevitably comes
with the tradeoff of a lower salary. At work, I might occasionally get stuck
on a project that I'm not too interested in, but that's why I get paid a
premium to do it. I think wanting a FANG salary, but also total control of
your workstreams, is honestly asking for a lot. It's wanting the best of both
worlds, with none of the drawbacks. If everyone could make six-figures a year
working on dozens of open source projects, they'd probably switch to doing
that, since it would be (hopefully) more rewarding.

------
langitbiru
I think the pandora box has been opened. I predict there are some people who
will build startups around this idea (not me). pip install something / npm
install someting/ brew install something, and you will see the ads. The
startup will build a dashboard for advertisers. The terminal will be the next
frontier for advertisements.

The storm is coming.

------
evantahler
The links in the article to other blog posts from famous open-source
developers really helps his points... don't skip them!

------
Ninn
In my mind this is a problem that must be solved at a packagemanager level,
where its both possible to dynamically allocate consumer money based on
utilisation/download distrubutions, and other allocation factors, such as more
sentimental ones.

In addition i think that just installing a module and then starting to recieve
funding is a bad carrot, as i can already feel the drama of people who will
refuse to give up abandoned packages and namespaces, just to claim their
funding. If you had it a bit more centralised you could atleast punish that
kind of behaviour and make people responsible if they want to participate in
the ecosystem of payouts.

~~~
rossmohax
Just a thought experiment, lets say funding was solved, but in a way that
package's funding is split between owner and all dependencies. Then there
would be economic incentive to implement trivial bits yourself and only
dependencies bringing true value would be pulled in. This in turn would weed
out all the rubbish packages as there would be no reason to create them in the
first place, since no one would be installing them. It can benefit whole
ecosystem where rules of Darwin's evolution come into play.

------
pbiggar
I'm frustrated that there isn't work being done on what I'm convinced is the
only option: sales people dialing companies for dollars to support open
source. I wrote up how it would work imo: [https://medium.com/@paulbiggar/how-
to-fund-open-source-8790e...](https://medium.com/@paulbiggar/how-to-fund-open-
source-8790e42e10fe)

------
djake
Why don't npm/yarn/github/etc have explicit support for premium packages that
cost money? It can provide revenue for the registry, too.

Napster and LimeWire were cool because people got something for free and, all
else being equal, people prefer free to not free; but all else is not equal
because free is not necessarily sustainable. If there were literally no way to
monetize music at scale, it would not have worked out well for consumers in
the long wrong, because there would be far less to consume.

People pay for software regularly. Package managers are marketplaces for
software, so it doesn't seem like a huge leap for them to facilitate the
exchange of funds. Then feross can charge money for standard if he wants, and
people that don't think it's worth it won't pay him and won't see an ad and
won't use the software.

~~~
zawerf
I think github is already trying to do many of those things. They started
Github Sponsors[1] and Github Package Registry[2] recently.

Regular github already makes it pretty easy to choose an open source license
for your project. If they add better support for creating a commercial license
integrated with their package registry and automating revenue splitting among
contributors, I can see it working.

[1] [https://github.com/sponsors](https://github.com/sponsors) [2]
[https://github.com/features/package-
registry](https://github.com/features/package-registry)

------
weq
My company wants to move to open source to reduce costs.

IP based software = High level management get involved and balance against
other costs.

FOSS software = Engineer tells management there will be no cost, so management
goes out and spends on other things.

A single site where a company can go to contract a maintainer for a single
peice of work or consulting may be a good start....

------
verisimilitudes
_Right now, the status quo is that maintainers create massive amounts of value
and then for-profit companies and SaaS startups capture almost all of it._

I use the AGPLv3 for most of my software, because I don't work for free, for
the most part, and want to use the strongest copyleft license available to
ensure this. That parasitic corporations fear copyleft and the AGPLv3 in
particular is just icing on the cake.

If you don't want your software used in this way, then don't use a permissive
license. I sometimes use the most permissive licensing, the CC0, when I write
something truly trivial and don't believe I could get away with making it
copyleft. Perhaps you understand this general approach, but also that people
would simply use a different implementation of your libraries if you did this
is the issue here. You don't mention _Free Software_ once this entire article
though, so I find that unlikely.

 _But telling maintainers to bury their appeals where no one bothers to look
is not the answer, either._

I vehemently oppose giving Github even more influence in the form of financial
payments to its users. That's asinine and I refuse to use Github.

 _No one knows the value of a sponsor message in the terminal since this has
never been tried before. That’s why this was an experiment._

The value is nil. I don't need to take a flame to a rabbit to know it will
burn.

 _Fellow open source maintainers and open source contributors have, by and
large, been supportive of the experiment. Open source “consumers”, not so
much._

I'm not an _open source_ maintainer, but I write Free Software libraries and
I've voiced my opinion in the other thread here. This paragraph creates the
impression only those who don't contribute disliked what you did. For the
record, I found it and continue to find it suitably amusing.

 _Many supporters expressed their dislike of advertising – even advertising
where the sponsors are carefully selected and the implementation does not
track users or collect data._

Advertising is inherently awful and nothing will change that.

 _Approximately 100% of the Fortune 500 use open source code. Maintainers are
just starting to wake up to our own power. Expect to be surprised. This
certainly won’t be the last open source funding experiment._

I suggest investing in Free Software and not _open source_ ; is it any
surprise that the rebranding of software freedom specifically tailored to
corporate interests encourages this?

 _Even for simple single-purpose packages, there’s a non-trivial ongoing
maintenance burden. Especially when you’re maintaining hundreds of packages,
as many in the Node.js community do._

I've taken a look and I could probably claim hundreds of packages as well, if
I wrote many, trivial packages, which is most of what I saw under your name. I
currently have five libraries, two or three of which are somewhat trivial, not
counting complete programs and other such things. It seems unfair to claim
hundreds of packages when many of them seem so trivial and this is also never
mentioned.

~~~
mikekchar
Not to put too fine a point on it, "Free software" was invented to level the
playing field. Copyleft was an attempt on building an ecosystem with a level
playing field. Nobody has more or less abilities with respect to the code. The
receiver of the code has the same abilities as the copyright holder (with the
exception of being able to change the license).

When you choose a more permissive license, it may still be free software, but
it may not promote a level playing field. This suits a lot of companies, but
it's not that good for programmers (unless you are in the employ of said
companies). As an independent programmer, copyleft (or share-alike) is your
friend. I find it strange that this is a controversial point.

------
aripickar
One model that might work for getting paid for FOSS is having X.0.0 releases
be free and all other X.X.X releases under some kinda paywall. Things like bug
fixes, small features that individual users want would be available for
purchase. However, the vast majority of the package, especially the base
functionality would be available for use.

For large commercial uses, not having access to individual bug updates and/or
security fixes would potentially outweigh the cost of purchasing a paid
subscription. OTOH, for personal use exploring a project and its capabilities
wouldn’t cost anything.

I’m sure there’s going to be adverse selection involved here, but if you don’t
have a good enough X.0.0 product, getting people to pay for the X.X.X version
is unlikely.

------
miguelmota
The problems with this 'funding experiment':

\- If he does advertising, everyone will eventually start doing it. Then
everyone will start using adblockers, defeating the purpose originally planned
for. It's a classic case of the Tragedy of the Commons situation [0]. This
experiment would have never worked in the long term and only benefits those
who do it in the beginning momentarily.

\- He created a github issue thread asking for feedback from everyone [1], but
then closed the issue thread. Later one he went on saying that he doesn't care
what people say unless they're contributors to the library [2]. He could have
just limited the thread to contributors only but he prefers pushing the goal
post.

\- If you can no longer support OSS, then hand it over to an organization open
to the community, or archive the project. As an example, Fatih archived
projects he could no longer support and the community had no issues at all
[3]. People who can contribute will fork the project and continue with it.

\- The core-js maintainer started doing ads like that first, promoting his own
job advertisement [4]. It got to the point where he started deleting comments
and blocking people on github which he disagreed with. Keep in mind that this
is a package with million of weekly installs and used by babel libraries so
people's output logs looked like this [5]. I believe it was violating NPM's
terms of service too.

\- Authors can do whatever they want with their own packages including
spamming post install logs with ads, but expect the programming community to
be very vocal against the practice [6]. A package meant for the community
should listen to the feedback of the community, instead of calling them wrong.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons)

[1]
[https://github.com/standard/standard/issues/1381](https://github.com/standard/standard/issues/1381)

[2]
[https://twitter.com/feross/status/1165515455882096640?s=20](https://twitter.com/feross/status/1165515455882096640?s=20)

[3] [https://arslan.io/2018/10/09/taking-an-indefinite-
sabbatical...](https://arslan.io/2018/10/09/taking-an-indefinite-sabbatical-
from-my-projects/)

[4] [https://github.com/zloirock/core-
js/issues/548](https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/548)

[5] [https://github.com/zloirock/core-
js/issues/548#issuecomment-...](https://github.com/zloirock/core-
js/issues/548#issuecomment-494353845)

[6]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cus0zu/a_3mil_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cus0zu/a_3mil_downloads_per_month_javascript_library/)

------
spasquali
If your goal is profit then giving away your work for free isn't a good
strategy.

What you gain with open source is free distribution and advertising (public
git, free advertising in the form of package.json, mentions in readmes,
articles demonstrating your code, and so forth). OS maintainers are also
gifted free labor (I didn't read anything here about profit sharing with
contributors/debuggers, or how that might work, or even if it could work). It
may not feel nice, but if you're going to question the economics of a market
you need to be honest about cost and value.

In fact OSS maintainers are massively subsidized by the community, by large
companies (like Github) and so forth. And this is an automatic cost subsidy
that operates outside of value. Most OS software has little (or negative)
value, yet is allowed to survive, when in an open market (where it costs
something to maintain market presence) most OS projects would be eliminated,
reducing the massive cost to teams and companies doing the (free) work and
assuming the large risk of eliminating bad products, work a real market would
have done for free, by voting with their power to install (or not), ie. buy.
If I install one NPM module I am essentially "blackmailed" into installing
several others, which may introduce hidden costs that only I will be
responsible for (and not the original product creator). It cuts both ways.

It is also disingenuous to elide the real financial benefit of maintaining a
popular OSS product. A fair analysis demands a clear accounting of year over
year income growth to OSS maintainers able to convert the (perceived) demand
for their products into higher wages or other payments for their time in terms
of design, engineering, community management, and so forth.

I feel the "good cause" argument is being misappropriated. If you believe in
software and making the world a better place through development and sharing
then there should be a dot at the end of that sentence. I write books (don't
do it!) and give away a lot of software (do it!) because I think freedom is at
the end of that work. I'm happy with that in this margin-focused, "if you're
not making money you're a nobody" world. The relevant progenitor here is
Stallman, not Smith. Idealism is low margin, typically.

Facebook and Google release a lot of open source software. Why aren't their
Patreon numbers through the roof? Should they be? Have you used Linux? Git?
Why haven't you paid Linus something (a lot!)? Still getting nagged on your
code editor about paying for a license? Why haven't you paid it? Why aren't
businesspeople who also give away their software for free (for a time) being
paid by every single consumer using their software (see:
[https://www.sublimetext.com/buy?v=3.0](https://www.sublimetext.com/buy?v=3.0))?
Why is nagging even necessary?

There is more. Will a hypothetical "deserving" maintainer add features based
on the requirements of her sponsor(s)? Will bug fixing priority be determined
based on sponsorship amounts? This already happens. And it should! But that's
a very different game, and please don't claim that this special class of human
beings is beyond corruption. Beware the person who claims their purpose in
making and giving away free stuff is "love ️ ", and then later asks for a
donation. Cults work that way. Drug dealers work that way.

That being said, please do make money if you can. Money you earn. By
delivering rare value that you can convince someone, at your own expense, to
buy. Like everyone else. The consumer isn't obligated to pay for what they can
get for free. If you are upset about the lack of income, stop doing free work.
Those who intend to pay nothing for the OSS they use are "less ethical" in no
way whatsoever. And claiming to deserve what amounts to charity isn't
convincing to me, given that I expect every single one of the people who
benefit from say the top 100 repos earn six figure salaries and may even get a
free lunch, every day.

Keep giving. Be kind. Share. Don't covet.

------
bravura
Thought experiment for funding OSS:

tldr: Your avatar has a glowing halo that shows how much you contribute to the
OSS ecosystem. People thus always know how much of an OSS saint you are.

* Instead of gravatar, OSS projects start using fundavatar by default.

* You can contribute $$ to fundavatar to support OSS.

* The more $$ you contribute to fundavatar, the bigger your halo is on your avatar for people to see.

* Fundavatar has a smart voting mechanism to distribute funds among OSS maintainers, that involves your preferences and delegation past the granularity that you don't have preferences. I will describe in more detail if people want to know.

* Crucially, you can get a big halo just through OSS contribution and not lose money by joining fundavatar, because as an OSS maintainer you can pump X% of your revenue back into fundavatar.

