Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

The UI imposes a 5% minimum (and 15% default) value for "Tip thanks.dev" under "How much would you like to donate each month?" on https://thanks.dev/settings

This implementation is clearly for-profit. I want to directly tip open source projects using a system that doesn't involve other third parties taking a significant cut.

  What are your fees?
  Tips at time of donation. You decide.

Donation income is risibly small.

People will sign praise your work, tell you how much they depend on it, and how it changed their lives. Others will ask you tricky questions that really ought to be asked to a lawyer.

...and they still won't donate a cent. I get about 70 cents per thousand unique visitors. About one in every 14,000 visitors donate. Affiliate income is roughly 100 times that without trying.

Let me put it differently: with the same traffic, donations barely cover my groceries, and affiliate income is a comfortable salary.

I'm at peace with that. I make free things for a reason. It's just something to keep in mind when suggesting donations as a business model. Doubly so as an alternative to ads.

Another tidbit: praise people who create the things you use. It feels so good to know that people use and love the fruits of your labour. I've become lavish in my praise after experience the effects of it.

In case you hadn't seen this yet, GitHub offers this service: https://github.com/sponsors/explore (need to be logged in)

I have no insight but I could imagine that GitHub are going to offer something similar based on that data at some point in the future.

For us the "top" developers on that page are people with 150+ repos that we depend on that I have never head of before. It turns out that they are all tiny JavaScript libraries that we depend on in some repository that's not part of our real product.

I'm happy to sponsor them as well but it'd be cents not euros per month compared to libraries that do the "heavy lifting" for us. At the moment we hand-pick things, also not ideal.

All of that text to say: This is a hard problem, I have no idea how to solve it but I applaud you and everyone who's giving it a shot.

A 5% flat fee is too much for me though, if it had a cap then it'd be different.

At first I thought "Oh another Patreon/Open Collective" but actually this is kinda neat in how it works.

Slightly offtopic, but every month when my Patreon donations get processed Patreon sends me this STUPID email with "Tweet your receipt!" Honestly, it's so pathetic. It's like giving food to a homeless person while filming it so I can post it on Twitter.

Yes I realise it's an option and I don't have to (nor do I) click it.

I love and support this idea very much. I had actually been thinking about this exact solution myself, but I'd personally want to stay clear of anything involving real money, so it's great that you're doing it. :)

Just a note which probably isn't worth your time to act on, but using this service as a maintainer in Finland is illegal unless you can offer a geoblocking feature that can block any Finnish supporters from routing money to Finnish maintainers. This is due to our Money Collection Act which prohibits soliciting any donations except for very strict circumstances which aren't really applicable here. Might be worth a note on the page if you have extra time, since this is not know by many Finns that I've talked to.

So it looks like the idea is it goes through your GitHub dependencies, and splits your donation up among them.

That’s a pretty neat idea.

I wonder if it would be possible or even desirable to try and get some automatic measure of “how much” you depend on a given project, to weigh the split. Probably that would be really difficult to capture. Anyway the current idea is already pretty cool.

Nice idea. Like a personalized vanguard index for open source donations.

If this takes off people will be inventivized to make lots of small dependencies that are likely to be needed in tier 1 (or tier 2).

The trick will be to find a bug in a first dep of webpack for example, fork it and fix some bugs there then convince webpack to switch to you.

Algorithmic decisions can be gamed.

I suggest instead the app lists the deps, and you choose how much to give each one.

One thing that I haven't seen addressed here or in the FAQ is: What happens to donations towards dependencies where the maintainer / organization / group of maintainers is not registered at thanks.dev?

The FAQ has a section titled "What happens if I don’t claim my balance?", but I think this only applies to people registered at thanks.dev. I'm not even sure that thanks.dev would be able to reliably contact developers that / maintainers in all (most ?) situations.

Love this! Hope it will take off.

"Webpack receives close to $200k in funding per year via OpenCollective but its direct dependencies receive minuscule amounts of funding, and there are 80+ of them."

♥

I’d love too but I dislike using payment processors as middlemen for online transactions! I see you’re using Stripe which is one of the worst processors because they opaquely block all sorts of transactions. It would be great to use a system like this to promote and fund open source projects and fuel cottage industry without having to include megacorporations. Make a mail cash option for people who don’t want to show their papers to a payment processor!

Genius idea. I try to donate to open source software I've used for long time, especially if I cannot contribute any code back. This site seems to automate the process of finding out which dependencies of your software are accepting donations.

Unfortunately, I cannot use this right now, because Maven dependencies can't seem to be found, and neither can Cargo dependencies. I decided to test it with an app that uses a mix of ClojureScript and Rust. There is a shadow-cljs.edn file at the root level of the folder, but those dependencies are not picked up. Neither are stuff in a package-lock.json. There is a Cargo.lock file in a subfolder, but that does not seem to be scanned either.

However, I am able to verify there exist dependencies, in each of these files, that are actively seeking for funding and use GitHub sponsors.

I really want someone to succeed at this and I like the approach but you need to run not walk to making it usable without private source code access. That’s a non-starter.

There are several similar services out there, some of them are listed in the patronage section of the FOSSjobs wiki:

https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources#patronag...

Plot twist: This was the endgame of all those 1000s of trivial npm packages.

Folks may also be interested in checking out https://stackaid.us (previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32837829) as a different platform doing similar work

You open source guys need to figure out a way to charge people for the value that you provide. You ran the experiment for a very long time and it looks like this "beggar" model really doesn't seem to be working for the vast majority of your projects.

Take money, don't wait for people to give you money for the free value that you provide.

The intention is laudable, but this kind of business model makes me think of all these NGOs appearing in the 90s/2000s purportedly to "help poor africans" [0,1].

While many have been (trying to) do their best, it's unfortunate that many got richer on the back of the people they were supposed to help. Sometimes with local accomplices who also benefit from the grift.

I guess the main take away would be that transparency and accountability are paramount if you want to be part of such an ecosystem, especially as a middleman for money transactions.

[0]: https://landportal.org/node/100425

[1]: https://humanglemedia.com/the-dark-reality-of-corruption-lac...

> You need to enable JavaScript to access thanks.dev.

Not a great start for delivering me basic information on what this even is.

Reminder that Microsoft GitHub and GitLab do not have a duopoly on decentralized (self-hostable) version control. Products like this feed into folks feeling compelled to join big, proprietary services.

It's still early for GitHub's Sponsor feature but I'm a bit surprised this is not part of it already.

- They already understand what kind of code base it is and already do dependency scanning for security issues

- They have payment details

- They have the "verified" payment method of a person / project (If sponsoring is enabled)

Neat idea. Would it be useful to let folks analyze a repository without signing up? I'm thinking a user may want to scan a large repository and get a report (top X sponsor-enabled dependencies). This might be useful data to present during funding discussions.

I'm on the receiving end of donations from sourcegraph using this. It's around $10 per month from that single donation and is for the only Go HTML santizer, which you use when you have user generated / untrusted input that you need to display as HTML. https://github.com/microcosm-cc/bluemonday

For me the library has been good enough for my own use for a very very long time. I mostly neglect it unless there's some critical issue (which there hasn't been for a very long time — but clearly infosec world knows this lib exists as when I do make changes with crap commit messages I get emails asking what the implications are). I don't improve it at all as my time is better spent on my day job.

I've often thought that there's room for improvement such as a DOM style sanitizer to validate HTML input rather than just a SAX style sanitizer, perhaps formatting of output in addition to sanitising input, transformation rules to allow a safe embedly type thing, etc.

When I got the initial donation I was surprised, first ever bit of support for open source software I'd written (as this was not written on company dime).

Even at $10 per month it is motivating enough to think someone values it. If it accrues into something significant then I may actually feel motivated to improve it rather than just support it.

Interesting is that I'd regard this OSS lib as successful by usage as sourcegraph says 803 projects use it — but given that a fair number of those are things like Hugo which in turn have thousands of forks and many more thousands of instances of use, well it does appear that this sanitizer is to safe HTML in Go what https://xkcd.com/2347/ illustrates. Originally it was written for my own use and it's now used by virtually everything in the Go world that makes a website.

Perhaps people don't know this and libraries like it exists though? Perhaps they import some web framework and this came with it? Well, for that awareness thank you to thanks.dev

Of the models I've seen so far for supporting individuals who create OSS code this one stands out by highlighting dependencies. Likely the solution is a blend of things... a commission type system for rare engineers and skills (i.e. https://words.filippo.io/pay-maintainers/ ) and thanks.dev for the long-tail of those who have done things and you want to use it long-term. There are also companies who create OSS software, and if you value their work and don't want what they produce to go behind Enterprise differentiation then perhaps pay for their services too.

Awesome to see someone try and do this! I was kicking the idea around a few years ago but got sidetracked: https://github.com/tythe-protocol/tythe.

I use like 50 different software heavily. Each of these has like tens of developers.

I can donate to some and rotate each month, but how about the rest, and dependencies?

There is just so much software there that seems hopeless (although there are also billions of users).

We're trying to do this @ NimbusWS, but the corporate way.

Excuse the crappy looking site (been busy trying to actually deliver all the shit on that page), but I believe that F/OSS can be sustainable:

https://nimbusws.com/#sustainability

All it takes is contributing a small % of revenue back. I'm not decided that 10%-30% will be the final # (can a business give that much and still compete?), but then also some of me feels that it should actually flip at some point (30% for nimbus, 70% for F/OSS project) if most of the value is actually the F/OSS project (i.e. the project is so high quality that all we do is mostly run it and upgrade it happily).

Right now only the Redis service is available (object storage is coming soon (tm)), but kick the tires:

https://nimbusws.com/app (register @ the bottom!)

One thing we haven't figured out is how to pay library authors. dunno what to do, but early idea is some % contribution and letting people calculate allotment (ex. 5% of your 20% revenue donation must go to libs, but you pick which libs you depend on get the most).

How do I convince the management that it's worth spending a fraction of what 1 developer costs to give back to OSS?

I've thought about exact same thing for a long time. Except instead of just analyzing dependency list, create plugin for vscode/npm/etc and analyze how much each dependency is really used by you. Great that somebody finally built tool like that, good luck!

Is nobody concerned with the fact this tool scans your repository contents? This tool is mostly intended for use with private projects, not open source, so I would expect a LOT more scrutiny (and options) around security.

"Donation" is a somewhat tainted word, because it often has certain legal issues attached. Most maintainers aren't non-profits, so they don't take donations, they get income (and it'll get taxed). At the same time, "donating" something without it actually being a donation is complicated for businesses (e.g. github not invoicing me for sponsorships gets my tax consultants to make sad faces).

I understand the idea, but giving it a better legal framework than "it's a donation. but not really" would definitely help.

After Google shut down Google Reader I specifically went looking for an alternative I could pay money for and landed with Newsblur[0]. I've been a happy customer ever since.

Pretty soon after that I moved over from Gmail to Fastmail[1], again it was a service that took my money so that I was the customer not the product being sold.

[0] http://www.newsblur.com [1] https://fastmail.com/

This finally feels like a solution to a problem we all knew we had.

I receive a very small amount of donations on this platform for my work. I have some projects out there that are used as a dependency by a few million people. Fwiw in just over six months I've received around $20 and haven't cached it out yet. I get email notices about a few cents here and there but haven't bothered to take the time to setup Stripe in order to withdraw.

This is a great idea! Now I can finally pick a contribution level and have it automatically donate to my favorite projects.

Thanks for building this!

The dependencies(open source libraries) will figure out a way to game the system. I don't know how but maybe someone will try.

Is it possible to scan a repo without authorising your service access to my entire Github account?

Ahem...

https://liberapay.com/

Platform owner are registered as devs, who you can tip like any other devs. Hence their "cut" is not taken automatically from every transaction

You should order the people list, so that maintainer / repo owner come first.

I'm using Jekyll for my rinkidink website. Jekyll is the workhorse tool of Github. Github is owned by Microsoft, who's not hurting for cash, or so I've heard.

What I'm saying is it depends.

For this to work well, they need to get more devs on board (and more language support I guess). Currently none of my top-10 projects are there

I use like 50 different software heavily. Each of these has like tens of developers.

I can donate to some and rotate each month, but how about the rest, and dependencies?