Ask HN: Open-source authors, would you use this?
If you're an open source author or contributor, I would love your opinion:
I'm trying to imagine an open source monetization platform that's appealing to both contributors and companies. the idea is that, as an author, you can sell your services on the platform and companies would hire you to perform specific tasks, think of it as upwork for open source.
As an author, you can:
- Specify the professional services you could perform: custom integration, code review a specific PR, add a specific feature, etc..
- Get a "hire-me" badge to advertise that you're available for hiring.
- Get hired straight from the platform.
- Get tax forms for all your paid open source work in a single place.
As a company you can: - Hire the authors of the projects you're relying on instead of wasting engineering time or relying on external consultants.
- Sponsor a specific feature, PR, or addition to an open source project.
- Only pay one entity, one bill for all your open source needs. No need to deal with paperwork or paying multiple individuals.
We all know that donations and Patreon don't work, mostly because they're sponsored by empathizing developers and not companies who make money by using your projects.
"Let's help this person out with a donation" is not an appealing use case for a company.
"Let's hire this person, who knows what they're doing, to avoid 2 weeks of dev work and the pain of maintaining a fork" is.