Comment by KronisLV | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KronisLV | Hacker News Reader

Currently I use a tool called ScreenToGif on Windows, which allows making both GIFs as well as render a video out of the captured sequence of frames: https://www.screentogif.com/ (source: https://github.com/NickeManarin/ScreenToGif)

That said, a lot of open source software faces issues with funding and also developer burnout, or something other reasons for a project just... ceasing. Like there's this lovely piece of backup software called BackupPC, that covered all of my needs, but there hasn't been a new release in forever: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc

What's worse, sometimes the community is just left with no status updates, and don't even know whether a project is abandoned: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/issues/518

In cases where nobody cares enough to make forks and keep it alive it just... fizzles out.

This might sound a bit off, but I sometimes wish there was a feature where you could say: "Hey, I'm willing to pay X$ for the maintainer of the software to address this issue on GitHub or do a release, I've placed the amount of money in escrow and it will be released to the dev upon completion." With enough people pooling resources together, how much the community actually cares would be quite obvious and the devs could actually benefit from OSS. Donations are too unreliable and detached from the units of work done (I've done some donations in the past, but would do more monetary contributions for specific issues). If streamlined enough, it wouldn't be different from buying the developer a beer, or the equivalent of Patreon or Kofi.

Why don’t you contact the develop(s) and see if they’ll add it for $X?I did that once for an open source charting library that I was using. I really wanted a different graph than one of the defaults that was close but not quite what I wanted. I gave him ~$300 and he added it and emailed me later and told me he took his family on a nice day trip/lunch to some museums with the money. It can happen.

If you think money will motivate the dev, why not lead with that in your issue? I don't think offering to pay money is against TOS.

However, there is a large number of FOSS devs that don't give two shits about your money. Oh hey! Isn't that nice? Doing something you love, and something that brings value to your fellow human, without it being tainted by money?

Some people view the need of money as the problem, and the lack of it involved in their project a very conscious decision.

> I don't think offering to pay money is against TOS.

Yeah, that's why I think a bot for aggregating/suggesting financial support would be a good idea. Then again, when npm package maintainers were looking for donations and output that in the console, there was a lot of backlash, so I suspect similar opposition would happen to a bot commenting: "Hey, this project accepts financial support. If you'd like to indicate that this issue matters to you, you can optionally put money in a reward pool for this issue here: some_link. Money in the pool so far: X$."

> However, there is a large number of FOSS devs that don't give two shits about your money.

That's fair, but definitely isn't the situation for many, especially those who don't have cushy day jobs and are either financially struggling or just feeling the pressure of our current economy.

Articles like this come to mind: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html

The whole log4j debacle also comes to mind, summed up by this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/

> Some people view the need of money as the problem, and the lack of it involved in their project a very conscious decision.

That is admirable, but you can't eat praise. Either way, that is their choice.

I just feel that if there are a lot of companies extracting money from people with disposable income in the form of mobile games, gacha games and microtransactions wherever you can, as well as if there's a commonplace tipping culture for restaurants in many countries, might as well take the same principles and apply them to get some money in the hands of deserving developers.

I'm not saying that it'd necessarily decrease burnout or solve the other issues about open source, but at the very least it'd give some financial stability. If people aren't urged towards that, very few will donate of their own volition, call it psychology.

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