Tidelift’s maintainer survey keeps coming up for me: 46% of maintainers get paid nothing, and the top complaint is “not getting financially compensated enough or at all”. Good to see the Rupee Fund RFC tackling the community-funding side of that here.
I’m curious about a different group: projects that already bring in some money (sponsors, a hosted version, support contracts, paid add-ons), but where nearly all of it goes to the core maintainer(s), while the people sending PRs, docs and bug triage get a thank-you in the changelog.
If you run a project like that:
Where does the money come from today?
Have you ever tried sharing it with contributors? What stopped you, or what went wrong? (Working out who did how much? Tax? Arguments?)
If every merged PR automatically earned its author a recorded share of what the project brings in, priced up front on the issue, would you turn it on? Or would it attract the wrong kind of contributor?
Full disclosure: I’m building a tool around this called Ideato. It isn’t set up for open source yet, and I’d rather hear how you handle this today before I build anything for OSS. An honest “no, this would be a mess” is just as useful as a yes.
Suggestion : IMO, the best way to get an answer for your question will be to approach individual projects and ask this. Or maybe some other forum - reddit ?
I’d imagine that most projects cannot follow this model. This is technically possible in India, due to the low overhead UPI (maybe changing now - with Rs 2000 and above getting charged an overhead - but still nowhere as bad as the 2.5% of the foreign payments methods). However, accounting for small payments is not something that most people will be setup to handle.
You have probably heard of thanks.dev ? They have this model of paying dependencies, but their closed source algorithm seemed weird enough to me that I have not taken a second look at them in ages.
We have gone beyond RFC, and are looking for signups. Checkout https://rupeefund.org/ . One point of the fund that many miss is that developers and students are also “users”. Our model of community funding is that “everyone pools”, and the community overall votes on promising projects nominated by contributors only. We have much more written down about the Rupee Fund here : GitHub - RupeeFund/democracy: The democracy of the Rupee Fund · GitHub