Comment by cavneb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cavneb | Hacker News Reader

As much as I agree with the sentiment behind this post, I disagree with the implementation. The nature of open source code is collaboration. Paying for collaboration seems like it would hinder progress altogether and possibly direct the project into a direction that is not suitable for the poor majority not paying. One more thing that bothers me is that money for maintenance should not come from developers. This is like robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Disclaimer: I am the CEO of Code Sponsor (https://codesponsor.io)

Code Sponsor is trying to help provide those who are maintaining OSS projects with untethered sponsorship funds. They can go about doing their business on the projects and be making money through sponsor-based ad revenue. This provides them with the incentive and finances to justify continued support on those projects that end up being abandoned when unfunded.

I agree that this is a HUGE problem that needs to be addressed. Code Sponsor's approach is to go where money can scale: marketing budgets.

I've seen these kinds of things and have always been dubious that they are able to pay a full time salary for someone that is even close to what they could make with a normal full time dev job. What's the highest monthly amount your company pays a dev? What's the average and median?

Most of those using Code Sponsor are very new. I can tell you that so far this month (Sept 11) we are payout out $511 USD to developers. Last month we paid one developer over $130. It's not life changing, but it's excellent supplemental income.

You're likely going to be shut down by GitHub. They have a special section in their ToS that prohibits advertising.

https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/#k-...

> Short version: We do not generally prohibit use of GitHub for advertising. However, we expect our users to follow certain limitations, so GitHub does not become a spam haven. No one wants that.

>They have a special section in their ToS that prohibits advertising

Ehm, your quote does not quite support your statement:

>We do not generally prohibit use of GitHub for advertising

It's a TOS, worded for PR, besides which it's unenforceable and at the whim of GitHub.

It's like building a business on Google Reader or FB Parse.

We have advocates at GitHub and are in discussions with their compliance team. Code Sponsor is not directly tied to GitHub for it to be successful. Many of our developers are making money through different channels such as npm or their own generated documentation website.

Even though GitHub may say we cannot do this on their website, it does not prevent developers from generate a healthy side income building OSS.

Here's a blog post we just released which includes links to different developer repos and sites (aside from GitHub) https://medium.com/@codesponsor/fighting-for-open-source-sus...

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