Fighting for Open Source Sustainability: Introducing Code Sponsor

The authors are mistaken about the impact of employer-paid open source. It is orders of magnitude bigger than anything else, and it has a decades-long history of success in projects like Linux.<p>Companies aren’t doing it out of charity and don’t see it as such. They see (correctly) that it’s easier to get what they want by paying some people to work on an open source project than to start from scratch and pay for 100% of the cost.<p>I’m all in favor of more models, but until you’re channeling many tens of millions of dollars per year, your impact is much smaller than employer sponsored open source.

Full disclosure: I&#x27;m a long time sponsor (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rollbar.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rollbar.com&#x2F;</a>) and supporter of Code Sponsor. It&#x27;s a fantastic resource for the Open Source community, notably the smaller, independent projects. Supporting OS sustainability while generating awareness for Rollbar was a total no-brainer decision. The transparency in the system between sponsor and project owner is exceptional. They&#x27;ve built an interesting, novel solution to help ease any burden felt, maintaining and growing a project. Bravo!

Maybe I&#x27;m missing something, but I couldn&#x27;t find a source for their claim that &quot;Two-thirds of the top OSS projects are maintained by one or two people&quot;.<p>How many projects? How are they rated &quot;top&quot;? When you make such a bold claim, you should be able to back it up with verifiable sources IMHO.<p>Also, being a Red Hatter that has welcomed thousands of people in our New Hire Orientations, I dare say that we actually do employ quite some developers that continue their good work in a lot of communities. Describing that as &quot;the 1% approach&quot; feels a bit wrong.

&gt; <i>&quot;... while part goes to maintaining Code Sponsor itself.&quot;</i><p>If their intentions are &quot;pure&quot; and their primary purpose really is to help open-source developers, they should either be a non-profit and&#x2F;or completely open and honest and publish the sizes of each &quot;part&quot;. Preferably, that would look (at minimum) something like:<p><pre><code> October 2017 Income from sponsors: $ x Paid to developers: $ y ----- Kept by CodeSponsor: $ z </code></pre> Where z == x - y, of course.

I&#x27;ve been using Code Sponsor for a month or two now.<p>The best way to describe it is something between a generic Google Ads network and a invite-only Carbon Ads network. And it&#x27;s really meant to go in your README.md file.<p>So this results in a few things:<p>1. Broker. Sponsors can select which repos&#x2F;languages&#x2F;tech&#x2F;etc they want to advertise to and developers can select which sponsors are relevant to them.<p>2. Transparent. Developers can see which ads a sponsor will display and how much they pay per click (usually $0.40). The ads are usually just text with a couple emoji that fit well into the README.md design and are loaded as an svg.<p>3. Limited. Sponsors pay a fixed amount so if a repo is really popular and displaying ads, it may stop displaying after the money is paid out to the developers. This means you may just get a generic ad that recommends using Code Sponsor near the end of the month, like this repo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;styfle&#x2F;geoslack" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;styfle&#x2F;geoslack</a><p>Caveats: it seems the Code Sponsor is not open source :(

After reading the article, I _think_ this is an advertising network for oss project owners. Not a bad idea except why aren’t existing ad networks meeting this need? And...if most of the pages displaying these ads are served by GitHub, isn’t this stealing money GitHub has deliberately left on the table, and won’t they be upset by that and hence take action? Perhaps the plan is to succeed so quickly that GitHub buys them?

I&#x27;m a big fan of Code Sponsor! Eric who created Code Sponsor is passionate about his project and surely at your disposal for any query.<p>If you have a project with more than 100 stars, try it, you&#x27;ll really appreciate the transparency and the personalization of the ads you can have. Long life to Code Sponsor!

Does anybody know what the click &#x2F; view ratio is like on small projects? I know it depends on a lot of things but I really have no idea at all... Would it be below one percent or more around five, or something different?

Another upvote for Code Sponsor! Been using it for almost a month or so, and it&#x27;s pretty awesome.<p>Styfle already describes it very well, so I&#x27;m just gonna add that although I&#x27;m seeing a very shaky impression&#x2F;click rate, and my clicks are below what I expected to receive, the payout is quite big for an ad&#x2F;sponsor network like this. Also, it&#x27;s much better than ad networks - no detailed tracking and more (listed below by cavneb)!

Unfortunately, it&#x27;s limited to projects with 100+ stars. Cool idea though.

I totally love code sponsor ️