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Alex Rudenko
Alex Rudenko

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Today I am shutting down my side project

Hi,

Today I am shutting down my project about donations which focused on helping open source projects and authors of free content accept recurring payments.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DSeGUSTXUAEU-VE.jpg:medium

I would like to use this opportunity to open a discussion about open source funding. What I have learned over this time is that donations rarely work sustainable for open source projects. Users should really-really like the project to support it. And this is quite a hard job to keep people engaged over time. SupporterHQ was not particularly successful at this. Several competitors do a better job. We collected a list of competitor services in an awesome list https://github.com/60devs/awesome-crowdfunding-services.

How do you feel about donating money to open source projects in 2018? Do you regularly donate, occasionally or never?

Top comments (2)

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twof profile image
Alex Reilly

I donate to one project, but I think you're right about needing to feel close to the project. I think more important than that to me is feeling like I know who the people are that are working on the project, and it's kinda hard to know people when your only interaction is typically through pull requests. The project I donate to is also incredibly transparent about where the money is going which helps.

Is it common for companies to donate to open source projects? There's a lot more money there than with individual users, and I know loads of tech companies are making use of an open source project or two.

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orkon profile image
Alex Rudenko

Well, some companies do donate to open source projects. I think it becomes more widespread. For example, Discourse donated to open source projects they depend on blog.discourse.org/2017/12/discour... But it's not a typical company, I would say.