I have been running an open source MathJax-based mathematics pastebin[1] since 2012 and I had received 2 donations for it until recently. Then a mathematician tweeted[2] about it convincing others to send some donations. After that kind gesture by him, I received 3 more donations. So pretty sure I can't make a living out of donations. :-) But I still appreciate them because they help in covering a portion of the hosting cost.
Also, I never seriously expected donations for this project because I don't work much on it these days apart from cleaning up spam from time to time, complying with legal notices and occasional maintenance. I added a donation button only to see if someone would use it. Apart from covering hosting cost, I think an important side effect of the donations is that it provides some additional motivation to continue working on the project and develop it further which I indeed plan to do as soon as I can find the time for it.
What kind of legal notices are you routinely dealing with? That's a frightening aspect of maintaining an open source side project I hadn't really considered.
The first donation to my open source project (1) came from someone who went through the trouble of emailing me to ask how they could donate.
Since then, I've embraced receiving donations and last year I ended up receiving more than 10.000 euro. (2)
I (re)donate everything to charity, for reasons (3), but even then it's a great motivator. If it wasn't for the money I would have burned out long ago. It really means a lot when people show their support in such a tangible way.
I recommend everyone to both accept donations, and donate to others.
I've been trying to encourage more "Charityware" for software [0]. My software is free and open source (MIT license) [1] but I also sell it for $5 and donate $3.50 of every sale to a cost-effective charity. My goal is to increase donations to the charity, and asking people for donations wouldn't be as effective. My software now has generated almost over $9,000 in donations.
Personally, every purchase of my software feels rewarding. It's probably not as great as a regular donation, but it's a close second. Furthermore, since my software is pay-what-you-want (with a minimum of $5) people have been often giving more than the minimum. That really feels like a donation.
One thing that always hurts OpenSource project is the fact they have not ability for me to "Buy" it, with an actual invoice or receipt that I can give to my accounting people for the sale...
It is "donation" of a undetermined amount which is a much harder thing for me to clear the bean counters.
So by being able to go to a site, it buy now with a fixed price, and (I presume getting a receipt) you likey having gotten much more income than if you where to have a "donate to me" link with a open ended amount...
I would guess that the most well known charityware is Vim though I am not sure how well known it is that it is charityware. It has it embedded in the license [0].
I’m pretty excited about the GitHub Sponsors feature opening up worldwide, think it can actually help foster a culture of contributing back to the people whose work we all use. They’ve got an interesting page where they show you all the sponsorable projects you depend on, sorted by the most heavily depended-on projects first.
Besides voluntary contributions I want to see maintainers refusing to take feature requests and help requests from non-sponsors. Security issues and bugs are always welcome, of course, but it would be interesting to force people to pay for maintainers’ time and attention.
Would also be nice to promote sponsorship as marketing-companies spend tons of money on marketing, and visibly supporting important projects is a great way to do it.
The biggest oppurtunity would be to allow assigning money for tasks and solutions. Like there are so many really good projects with a lot of open issues and good ideas on things to improve a library/framework/project. The ability to say, hey, i am the project owner and i would love to add this cool feature to my library which is complicated, you can donate for this feature, like crowdfunding for software.
Or the other case. I have created many pull requests in the past which had been only a few lines to fix an existing bug but they did never merge it. Sometimes i received notifications for years from other people asking why it is not meged and they had to fork (and maintain) it to fix this bug. Just saying here are 50$ if you merge it would be a life-saver. No more maintaining a fork just to fix a bug which is not a priority of the owner who prefers adding more and more features.
My point is open source does not need to be free work from the maintainer. A platform like github could change the game by allowing people to get a small payment for what they are doing. But not like their actual plan by just giving them money, i want to connect it to a "problem" to solve (resolve issue, add feature, merge pr, ...)
Absolutely, and we should reminds eachother to donate, even when it’s just a couple of cents. It’s about the thought that counts and the culture of appreciation when it’s useful to you.
My first donation still means the most to me: a hamper full of chocolates and a personalised card. That was back in April and I'll treasure it for the rest of my life. The fact that someone's willing to go through those lengths to say thank you is still mindblowing.
Since then, the project that I've been working on opened publicly for donations in November. We're going to hit 1,000 donations today, with ~$13,000 and close to ~$600/m recurring [0].
It's a massive motivator to keep going. The "thank you" messages and financial contributions have turned my time spent contributing to open source into probably my most emotionally fulfilling experience.
I've been learning a new language for the last few years and without Ankidroid, there's no way I would have made as much progress as I did. Being able to study while away from my computer was really a game changer for me. I build my decks with lots of audio, images, and other fancy features of Anki, but I've never had to worry about whether a feature will be compatible with AnkiDroid because everything in AnkiDroid is seamless.
I left a donation - thanks for all of your effort!
I know this feeling, seeing people pay for your free software!
It's very rewarding, and also a sign that some people got huge value from your hard work.
Even if it's symbolic, or just enough to cover the server costs, it's what motivates me to continue.
Still, I wish more companies would donate to support the massive amount of open-source software and libraries we all use every day. I understand that making a company pay for something free is a challenge. But come on, they can pay vast amount of money for getting support for open-source softwares, support they will probably never use... :)
> I understand that making a company pay for something free is a challenge.
I don't know how many times I've heard variants of this. "You can't monetize open source because companies won't pay for it." It's not that hard to get them to support the project if you sell something that's not available for free. It could be as simple as selling a special version of the documentation for $25. That's obviously not at the same level as dropping a $5000 donation, but it's more than zero, and it's a heck of a lot easier for an employee to ask them to pay $25 for a tool they need to do their work than to ask them to donate $5000.
I got my first GitHub Sponsor the other day and even though it is just $1 / month it made me feel like a rockstar. Also I got $3 on BuyMeACoffee a few months ago and it was wonderful.
I definitely agree. From a different perspective, I have a few free albums on Bandcamp under a Creative Commons BY-SA, just as a side project. Getting $5 or $20 here or there is really nice — it makes me feel like someone found my music worthwhile to them, which is a good feeling.
I love stories like this. Most folks aren't in open source for the returns, and any form of gratitude is uplifting and incredibly motivating. I've got my fingers in so many open source pies that it's silly, but I do it because I love it. Yeah, some really big corps use my stuff and a few packages have millions of weekly downloads, but I'm not doing it for the money. It helps keep my skills and thinking fresh, networks me with a ton of people worldwide, improves my soft skills with every interaction, and makes me a better cooperative collaborator. I receive exactly $5.80 a month in donations (via Patreon) and I'm just happy that two people thought enough of my work to send me a few duckets from their hard-earned income every month. I'll happily take that beer money and the personal development that comes with it as a reward.
Is there an easy way to have people donate "to" my project where the money goes straight to my chosen charity but I still get some sort of notification / running total of how much has been donated? I think I'd like to know people were donating - I could ask they tell me but I'd never know if they didn't bother emailing or if nobody thought it worth donating - but I don't want any of the (tax) hassle that might come from personally receiving a donation, even if I always remembered to re-donate it on.
Also received 2 donations in total for my 2FA authentication app for mobile phones (and web runtimes) over a span of over 7 years. Since a few years I haven't madeany contributions to it as my daytime jobs took over and have kids since. Over the years noticed many companies suggested my projct as an alternative, but this caused people to expect me to be their support for lost bitcoins, etc. If there would have been some incentive I might have reconsidered working on it, but recently archived the project.
I still remember the first donation I received from my project [1] back in 2017, yeah it felt amazing. The person who donated also sent me an email with subject "much thanks".
I have been lucky enough to have a monthly GitHub sponsor (even two at one point), as well as several one-time donations through Ko-Fi, all for my Gemini browser, Amfora.
It's pretty exciting to actually be paid for open source, and helps motivate me to continue developing it, knowing there are users who genuinely care about it out there. Although to be honest, I've found the compliments I've gotten over it more rewarding and motivating than any donations. If the donations significantly increased somehow than I think that might flip, but either way I'm enjoying working on it.
It makes me sad to see developers donating time and effort to support an ecosystem (VSCode) built explicitly to spy on users and promote proprietary software.
The fact that VSC's core is released under an open source license is irrelevant to the harm that is being done.
Do you really think any of what you just said will be effective to your target demographic without being far more detailed, containing any sort of sources, or while being this unnecessarily inflammatory?
All the people you wish would care will scoff, dismiss the comment as being looney and that'll be that.
You have to realize that, unfortunately, in every part of life, marketing matters. Got to make a message your audience will appreciate.
There's always a time cost with financial things, at least. Some tax authority probably expects you to track and report that income, and will want their share.
$1 from 1000 people is equal to $20 from 50. If the project is widely used, I think the first model makes a lot of sense to encourage giving and to make a sustainable project.
This maybe unrelated, but something people should give some thought to when considering giving to open source projects. I give yearly to the projects I use, and I hope more people support open source this way.
Can relate. I only received one donation for my side project[0] but more than money. It gave me some motivation to continue to work on it, thinking that it's so useful for someone out there that he/she actually gave money for that.
I also recently received a first $5 donation on an OSS project I created and have been supporting since 2017. It was a really pleasant surprise and motivated me to spend a bit more time on the project to move through some bug fixes and feature enhancements. It’s amazing what a small gesture like that can do.
[+] [-] susam|5 years ago|reply
Also, I never seriously expected donations for this project because I don't work much on it these days apart from cleaning up spam from time to time, complying with legal notices and occasional maintenance. I added a donation button only to see if someone would use it. Apart from covering hosting cost, I think an important side effect of the donations is that it provides some additional motivation to continue working on the project and develop it further which I indeed plan to do as soon as I can find the time for it.
[1] http://mathb.in/
[2] https://twitter.com/daveinstpaul/status/1345082256361193473
[+] [-] bigiain|5 years ago|reply
Or 1200% YoY growth!
(VCs please form an orderly queue...)
[+] [-] akersten|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fierarul|5 years ago|reply
It would be trivial for you to also put a PayPal address, which seems safer for one-off donations.
You might also be tempted to put BTC/ETH addresses but I doubt there's many donors that way.
[+] [-] offtop5|5 years ago|reply
I'd assume economists are a significant portion of them ???
[+] [-] metahost|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joostdecock|5 years ago|reply
Since then, I've embraced receiving donations and last year I ended up receiving more than 10.000 euro. (2)
I (re)donate everything to charity, for reasons (3), but even then it's a great motivator. If it wasn't for the money I would have burned out long ago. It really means a lot when people show their support in such a tangible way.
I recommend everyone to both accept donations, and donate to others.
(1) https://freesewing.org/ (2) https://freesewing.org/blog/bye-2020/ (3) https://freesewing.org/docs/various/pledge/motivation/
[+] [-] thetrustworthy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morgengold|5 years ago|reply
(1) https://freesewing.org/community/join/
[+] [-] yboris|5 years ago|reply
Personally, every purchase of my software feels rewarding. It's probably not as great as a regular donation, but it's a close second. Furthermore, since my software is pay-what-you-want (with a minimum of $5) people have been often giving more than the minimum. That really feels like a donation.
[0] https://medium.com/@whyboris/charityware-doing-good-with-pro...
[1] https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
[+] [-] syshum|5 years ago|reply
It is "donation" of a undetermined amount which is a much harder thing for me to clear the bean counters.
So by being able to go to a site, it buy now with a fixed price, and (I presume getting a receipt) you likey having gotten much more income than if you where to have a "donate to me" link with a open ended amount...
[+] [-] erk__|5 years ago|reply
[0]: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/uganda.html#license
[+] [-] sudhirj|5 years ago|reply
Besides voluntary contributions I want to see maintainers refusing to take feature requests and help requests from non-sponsors. Security issues and bugs are always welcome, of course, but it would be interesting to force people to pay for maintainers’ time and attention.
Would also be nice to promote sponsorship as marketing-companies spend tons of money on marketing, and visibly supporting important projects is a great way to do it.
[+] [-] tpetry|5 years ago|reply
Or the other case. I have created many pull requests in the past which had been only a few lines to fix an existing bug but they did never merge it. Sometimes i received notifications for years from other people asking why it is not meged and they had to fork (and maintain) it to fix this bug. Just saying here are 50$ if you merge it would be a life-saver. No more maintaining a fork just to fix a bug which is not a priority of the owner who prefers adding more and more features.
My point is open source does not need to be free work from the maintainer. A platform like github could change the game by allowing people to get a small payment for what they are doing. But not like their actual plan by just giving them money, i want to connect it to a "problem" to solve (resolve issue, add feature, merge pr, ...)
[+] [-] prox|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] namanaggarwal|5 years ago|reply
It felt so good that I went ahead and create a wallet and he donated me some fractional BTC. It wasn't much at that time but it motivated me a lot.
[+] [-] unnouinceput|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] david_allison|5 years ago|reply
Since then, the project that I've been working on opened publicly for donations in November. We're going to hit 1,000 donations today, with ~$13,000 and close to ~$600/m recurring [0].
It's a massive motivator to keep going. The "thank you" messages and financial contributions have turned my time spent contributing to open source into probably my most emotionally fulfilling experience.
[0] https://opencollective.com/ankidroid
[+] [-] trombonechamp|5 years ago|reply
I left a donation - thanks for all of your effort!
[+] [-] 255kb|5 years ago|reply
(Project on which I received donation: https://github.com/mockoon/mockoon)
[+] [-] bachmeier|5 years ago|reply
I don't know how many times I've heard variants of this. "You can't monetize open source because companies won't pay for it." It's not that hard to get them to support the project if you sell something that's not available for free. It could be as simple as selling a special version of the documentation for $25. That's obviously not at the same level as dropping a $5000 donation, but it's more than zero, and it's a heck of a lot easier for an employee to ask them to pay $25 for a tool they need to do their work than to ask them to donate $5000.
[+] [-] 4lejandrito|5 years ago|reply
I got my first GitHub Sponsor the other day and even though it is just $1 / month it made me feel like a rockstar. Also I got $3 on BuyMeACoffee a few months ago and it was wonderful.
Keep up the good work.
[+] [-] veridies|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrew_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Whitespace|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hamuko|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sudhirj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kingosticks|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbraad|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davide_v|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://github.com/DavideViolante/Angular-Full-Stack
[+] [-] makeworld|5 years ago|reply
It's pretty exciting to actually be paid for open source, and helps motivate me to continue developing it, knowing there are users who genuinely care about it out there. Although to be honest, I've found the compliments I've gotten over it more rewarding and motivating than any donations. If the donations significantly increased somehow than I think that might flip, but either way I'm enjoying working on it.
https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora
[+] [-] sneak|5 years ago|reply
The fact that VSC's core is released under an open source license is irrelevant to the harm that is being done.
[+] [-] UltraSuperUser|5 years ago|reply
All the people you wish would care will scoff, dismiss the comment as being looney and that'll be that.
You have to realize that, unfortunately, in every part of life, marketing matters. Got to make a message your audience will appreciate.
[+] [-] jjice|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qertoip|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kd5bjo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ece|5 years ago|reply
This maybe unrelated, but something people should give some thought to when considering giving to open source projects. I give yearly to the projects I use, and I hope more people support open source this way.
[+] [-] RMPR|5 years ago|reply
0: https://github.com/rmpr/atbswp
[+] [-] cdubzzz|5 years ago|reply