I'm sorry, but I would never give money to an open-source project through a VC-backed company that takes a 10% commission. I could maybe live with it if it was 0.5%, but heck I'll just find the maintainer and wire them the money somehow. Github Sponsorship takes 0% from private accounts.<p>I could very much be wrong about this, but the whole thing feels like it's coming from the perspective of someone thinking "I've heard about OSS, let's see how I can monetize it", rather than "I've participated in the OSS world for a long time, and I have an idea that can improve it".
So a VC-funded company expected to produce unicorn returns is going to accomplish this when non-profits haven't?<p>It doesn't seem logical but I hope someone can pull it off!<p>I would like to learn more about the background of the founders - what they've already done in any way related to this. Why does Polar have a chance?
I have had situations where i wanted to use an open source tool that was somewhat obscure and i would have paid $300-400 an hour for consulting from the maintainers/creators and could not get in contact with anyone. So if you create open source software i recommend posting a link to a consulting business with some minimum price that you are satisfied with, even if its something like $1k an hour.
Definitely a problem that needs to be solved. And the current donation/patreon/coffee mechanism just doesn't work.<p>The problem is that I don't know if people/businesses are really willing to pay the actual cost of getting things done.<p>I'm not even sure people even appreciate the work that is involved in most of their requests - how many times have you looked at some commercial software and had the "could build that in a weekend" reaction.<p>My other concern is around expectations. I've always tried to be very clear with any donation type thing that it's a donation. There's no obligation created on my part to provide any services or support. Directly coupling payments to requests might turn this into much more of a "I paid you to do this, why isn't it done yet".
I’m glad to see more people tackle the problem of open source funding; at the same time, I’m not convinced that adding VC money to the problem makes things any better.<p>There’s a secret third thing that never seems to get mentioned: not pittances through donations and not speculative investment from VCs, but plain old paid engineering. Most open source maintainers don’t want to be “entrepreneurs”; they just want to be paid an (approximately) fair rate for their time. Hiring them (or paying them for consultation time) achieves this.
If anyone wants to see Polar in action on a GitHub issue, I'm experimenting with Polar on my Architecture Decision Record repo:<p><a href="https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture-decision-record/issues/51">https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture-decision...</a><p>(I'm on the fence about the value of Polar for this kind of issue... see what you think)
This is interesting and I genuinely hope you succeed because OSS funding is important.<p>I have some questions:<p>1. Can anybody place a bounty on any issue? That seems like it could take control away from the maintainer. Is there a way for a maintainer to reject an issue bounty, so they can keep control over the direction/architectural decisions of the project?<p>2. Could someone pledge money towards a milestone (e.g. the next major version) rather than specific issues?<p>3. Are you offering any kind of business support to maintainers, such as reaching out to business users on their behalf to negotiate a sponsorship/support contract/bounty/etc? The sales part of all of this seems like it's the biggest challenge for OSS projects where it's just a few engineers who don't have the time or skill to do sales.
I wish success to initiatives like that.<p>From the article I didn't understand the model. Or how it is diffirent from existing projects like <a href="https://bountysource.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://bountysource.com/</a> and others.
Great to see more in this space. We've been working on the same problem with <a href="https://www.ringerhq.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.ringerhq.com</a> for the past ~year and have seen great success with specific projects. We're changing our approach slightly to give contributors and maintainers more tools after receiving feedback on specific features. If I can reiterate one piece of advice: listen to the community!
(Old man rant)
For fuck's sake.<p>If I wanted to be a social media influencer, I'd be on Instagram / OnlyFans.<p>If i wanted to spend my time "an entrepreneur with superpowers to convert the community into backers", I would be running a company / start up doing sales.<p>I wish to write code.<p>Some of that code is open source.
Some of it I write because someone pays me to do so.<p>I dont have to do any sales and that is fantastic.<p>So far nobody has given me money for my open-source code and that is fine.<p>I write my open-source tools because I admire those who came before me and
all they have contributed to the world.
It is a civic duty.<p>They gave us operating systems, compilers, databases, libraries.<p>When someone creates a new thing and its 90% derived from free tools
with a bit of code sauce / UI on top it, call it open source and then run around wanting to get paid for it they are in the wrong pasture.<p>If you are wanting to make billions of dollars and you create some form of
"open source" system but you get angry if someone uses it and does make
money from it, you are in the wrong pasture.<p>Contemplate Linux, (Open)*BSD, GNU tools, Postgres and everything open source
you use to make your product and none of which you have paid for.
Imagine if Theo had $1 for every OpenBSD install. (I love OpenBSD)
Id owe him at least a few hundred dollars.
On aggregate he would be at least a millionaire.<p>For people who do want to inject money into open source that is great.
Dont pick me.<p>Pick projects that are vital in the stack and who are underfunded.
Won't this just encourage maintainers to sit on issues... just waiting for the bounty to increase? They might even purposefully introduce painful but simple bugs just to push consumers to pay to have them fixed.
I'm your target and I don't exactly understand what you're writing.<p>For example, I want to donate $100 toward Rust Rocket version 1.0.0.<p>Can Polar help with this goal? If so, what's my next step?
Props for trying, the software world needs something like this.<p>However, I don't see how this is not fundamentally just a Github feature. They don't have it now, but if Polar gets any traction, they'll implement it pretty swiftly and probably eat your lunch.
We did this in 2010 :). In the years since there has been many similar attempts. This one, however, seems to have all the important things right. Congrats for the funding and good luck!
This may sound crazy, but I think the right model for open source funding is charging for updates. Red Hat has actually shown us the way. Developed world Ubuntu/Red Hat/SUSE users should pay $~20/year for access to all releases, $5 of which goes to the distro, $5 which goes to the base system/core utilities, and the rest should fund your particular OSS apps/frameworks/supporting apps running above the base layer.<p>Yes, obviously donation/sponsorship doesn't work, but I'm not sure pay per issue resolved is the best model either. Good apps shouldn't be punished for having few issues, or needing few features.<p>People should be able to opt in, but I think opting in at the distro level is the right choice as it would create a broad base of support. Of course, there will be those that don't want to pay, but I think a premium model for power users and enterprise customers makes sense. These premium users could have access to beta/nightly channels, early SRPMS/src debs, and priority or triaged issue/PR resolution?<p>Are there issues to be resolved? Yes, of course. How to divide payments to apps, and within app communities, but these aren't insurmountable problems. Canonical, etc., could simply set standards and require app communities to explain any variance from those standards.
The vision for the v1 is spot on. There were some attempts to turn the open source ecosystem into a creator economy - they are so similar but…<p>The big BUT is that software needs to be maintained whereas a video once uploaded on YouTube doesn‘t need to be edited again.<p>I have a feeling that Birk and the Polar team have the right insights to build the right tools to serve the specific needs of open-source software maintainers.
Interesting idea, A small but impactful change I would make would be to change dollar amounts into tokens. e.g. 1 token = $50.<p>A company might want to buy 1000 tokens and allocate tokens individually to specific issues, but they also might want to put tokens in a pot the maintainer can access to "spend" on issues they want to prioritise for the project or allow them to "spend" tokens at a specific rate, etc.<p>It also means that money is committed upfront by the companies, i.e. the money is real and exists, has been set aside for this thing and in case of a dispute polar can make decisions, etc
Polar asks you to grant "act on your behalf" permissions to your Github. As someone who has both professional and open source projects at Github, that's a definite deal breaker
Fix an unfixable thing?<p>Edit: to expand -- these initiatives seem to always be cooked up by people who do not write software, don't fix bugs, don't hire software developers. They never work because adding a feature to a product or fixing a bug isn't a commodity item that you can just buy with a click and spread cost between many parties.<p>The result is that most of the prospective purchasers end up having an easier path to get what they want, which is to fork and fix themselves (usually via in-house devs already on staff).
Now that the company is funded, are you hiring? I'd love to work for a company that has the sole goal of making FOSS sustainable, I even wrote a bit about it here: <a href="https://raphael.lullis.net/open-source-funding/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://raphael.lullis.net/open-source-funding/</a>
<a href="https://ondsel.com/blog/software-bounties-are-a-dumb-idea/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://ondsel.com/blog/software-bounties-are-a-dumb-idea/</a><p>Conclusion:<p>> Bounties are a lousy foundation for sustainable development of large projects like FreeCAD. They typically represent a gross underestimation of real work required to solve a problem, commonly miss a bigger picture, and encourage worst software development practices.<p>Growing larger is fun but also really overwhelming. Most ambitious projects that aim to stay afloat will have to experiment with different approaches to getting funded on a regular basis and come up with their own mix of solutions. It’s that or perish.
I will on occasion email an OSS maintainer offering to pay for some improvement or consulting. But I don't do this often because of the friction. In other I can't even find their email, but then it feels awkward to publicly post this in a GH issue.
I think I prefer StackAid, it funds the entire chain of dependencies and doesn't lock anything down: <a href="https://www.stackaid.us/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.stackaid.us/</a>
Nice idea and good luck :)<p>>Join our Discord to discuss ideas, early design proposals and upcoming features<p>Yeah, no...disheartening to see this many FOSS developers opting for Discord for realtime chat.
I was very confused, I thought this was about the polars, data science/data analytics toolkit. I know names are hard, but maybe pick something more distinct.
>Premium access. Educational material<p>Arguably, putting a restrictive licence on manuals makes something not free software <a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.html</a>