[gravyboat]

While this may work for individual contributors I don't see how it benefits open source work and the community in general. It suggest writing articles and creating videos but there is then a drive to release less information publicly to try and get people to pay because your code is confusing or your docs are lacking. That seems like a big negative.

It also doesn't work for team based projects. I'm one of the maintainers of Streamlink [1] which has members from around the world and we've been running various methods of donation since 2017 or so. In that time our Open Collective [2] has made about $1600 USD. We have over 50,000 users across all platforms (based on download stats as we don't collect any metrics in our apps so it's potentially higher) yet the entire amount we've collected is thanks to less than 100 people. We note the Open Collective on every release as well.

My own personal donation methods total $15 from one person in the past 5 years since we forked the project and started maintaining it. We have more users than many start ups do and I know that there are several companies using our software, but I haven't figured out how to make donations really work yet. How do we determine who should make what from a shared pool of money? How do you value a contribution, PR, etc., and most importantly how do you get users to actually pay without negatively impacting the project?

[1]: https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink [2]: https://opencollective.com/streamlink