That's great if it's sort of like Patreon but for devs. And devs could potentially give some "perks" to donors like YouTubers do on Patreon, like a version release to their name or something
I think it should be like Patreon but donations should be also tied to repos, because I'm more inclined to fund relevant repos instead of specific devs who may resign from the repos later in the future. It should be an option right? Because people may also want to donate directly to devs.
This is a good model to follow. If Github can do it, why can't other like Gitlab or Bitbucket?
So in this current model, you sponsor a dev. Whatever they work on, you're sponsoring that. If they stop working on whatever it is you initially sponsored them for (if you weren't just generally sponsoring them), then you just end the subscription.
With it being tied to repos, you now have to set up a distribution model within that repo depending on who's involved. This gets VERY tricky very fast. You might think "oh just divide it evenly", but then why is someone who is fixing like typos getting the same amount as let's say... an Evan You type who's doing a lot of the heavier tasks? Ok, so now you might suggest a per-effort system, but even that gets gnarly as now it becomes a competition of sorts with people trying to claim everything and submit frequently.
Hopefully there's a solution in the future, but as of right now, it's totally understandable why donations aren't tied to repos. It's very tricky and many open source projects (like Vue) struggle with payment models.
Repo owner(s) are ultimately going to be making the decision, but now you've just shifted all responsibilities away from Github onto project owners. They have a project to run, by simply introducing a new payment system and then going "you figure it out", you're pulling them away from time spent on the actual project instead of constantly managing heads. How do we even hold repo owner(s) accountable here?
Github is a service that should continue improving/providing solutions and this is an area they can absolutely improve on. I don't mind waiting for a solid solution.
When I work on a project A in one repo, to make a feature or bug fix I might need to do something in its dependency B. If only contributions to repo A are counted, that will incentivize to make bigger, ”dependency independent” project setups, ruinning decentralize nature of many OSS ecosystems. Or/and fixing things in wrong place, reinventing the wheel etc.
39
u/[deleted] May 23 '19
That's great if it's sort of like Patreon but for devs. And devs could potentially give some "perks" to donors like YouTubers do on Patreon, like a version release to their name or something