from Hacker News

We Just Gave $260k to Open Source Maintainers

by mwarkentin on 10/28/22, 1:11 AM with 38 comments

  • by qwerki on 10/28/22, 2:33 AM

    Hi HN,

    This is a great initiative in supporting open source. I’m the founder of https://thanks.dev mentioned in the article and I’ve been speaking to a lot of community members over the last year.

    There’s a lot of great work being done in the background that we don’t hear about and there’s an opportunity to do a lot more. I’ve learnt an immense amount since I’ve been working on this project and the diversity in thought & perspective I’ve encountered has been amazing!

    Happy to chat if anyone is interested.

    Big kudos to Chad & Sentry!

    Ali,

  • by bradgessler on 10/28/22, 5:42 AM

    I’d like to see GitHub build into their product a way for Organizations to set donation budgets per user.

    For example, Microsoft could allocate $100 annual budget per user in their GH Engineer team. The people on those teams could then donate those dollars to whatever open source projects they see fit on GitHub.

    I know this would require a lot of paperwork, etc, etc, but they’ve already buried themselves in it with donations and seemed to have outsourced most of that to Stripe.

    I know there would be some shady shit and scams that would happen if this was built, like people donating to their cousins OSS project that has 2 stars and is a fork of Scriptaculous, but there’s lots of different ways to minimize those risks so it’s a moot point.

    Overall this approach would lower donation friction for both the company and the employee and inject a lot more cash into the donation ecosystem.

  • by charcircuit on 10/28/22, 4:40 AM

    thanks.dev sounds pretty shady. They seem to collect donations for projects on their behalf without telling them. So while you think you are donating to some dependency you really are giving the money to thanks.dev where they can hold onto the money until someone realizes their project has more than the minimum amount. The FAQ says that if people don't withdraw the money within 3 months it just gets sent to other people. This means that someone could donate $100 to a project and then that money ends up never making it to the author of the project. Or if you have a small project your donations never reach enough for you to withdraw them.

    The article mentions that thanks.dev has a global blacklist of people who you can't donate to. This means they have the power to make certain dependencies get a bigger share of the money that is being donated.

  • by halffaday on 10/28/22, 4:33 AM

    Some of the larger ones are Armin Ronacher’s own projects…

  • by cyansmoker on 10/28/22, 3:37 AM

    When reading the project list, I thought there was a project called "fapbot" lol

  • by svnpenn on 10/28/22, 4:38 AM

    > https://foundation.rust-lang.org/ 15,000

    With all due respect, they don't need this money. Rust is a great project, and deserving, but they already have plenty of sponsors.

    I would have rather seen 150 x $100 go to smaller projects. So much great software is being written, by people who are barely scraping by, and even $100 could be the motivation for someone to finish something widely useful.