Item — HN Reader

I judge OS projects on github by the presence of donation/sponsor information. If this is missing, the project will eventually die, regardless of how popular it may be. Sure, forks will popup, but would you use semantic ui fork or the original semantic ui?

To all of you out there who host their open source projects on sites like github: please provide ways for your community to help out. PRs are not helpful as if you get 100 PRs in a week, there is no way that you, as a single maintainer can ever evaluate and merge all of them. You will get tired, exhausted and start looking at your project as a second job which pays nothing.

Your project will be used by fortune 500 companies and when you find out about it, you will regret not having opened a gateway for donations.

I want to support projects like semantic ui, but please help me help you. Stop hunting “stars”, as this very article clearly shows how worthless they are (github should remove this feature imho).

2 comments

I'm one of the maintainer of Hurl [1], an Open Source project on GitHub. I work at Orange, a French telco company, and the project is under the company umbrella. So we don't have any "Sponsor" information, it's rather Orange giving back to Open source community.

I can keep working on it provided there are indicators of adoption from outside Orange. In this case, the only KPI are stars and forks numbers. So stars are really important to us.

[1]: https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl

I maintain one or two projects that are somewhat popular, and I'd love to monetize them (without compromising my FOSS ideals) so I could work on them more.

That said - perhaps I haven't looked hard enough, but it just doesn't seem like projects that accept donations make enough money (on the whole) to be worth the time spent setting up donations.

Sure, I've seen maybe two where a developer ends up being able to work on their project full-time (that's the dream), but most seem to make like $5/year or whatever.

Am I wrong? I would love to be wrong.

You have to get used to mentioning it in every available avenue (readmes, docs, CLI greeting message, any web UIs, release notes, issue templates, etc), and also be happy with a really slow ramp-up time, but yes, it’s possible. Source: I’m Benjie on GitHub if you want to check out my sponsors profile.

I missed your reply a few days ago. Sorry! And thank you for taking the time.

I'm terrible at marketing myself. I suppose that is a hurdle that I must overcome. I'll check out your projects to see what I can learn.

Congrats on your success!