this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
345 points (97.8% liked)
Programming
17424 readers
79 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Donations is a good way to handle paying maintainers, but unfortunately most people don't even know what open source software is or what software they depend on greatly that would deserve donations.
The problem is a bit deeper than this, because even if a user is familiar with open source software and is willing to support application projects that they like, they aren't going to know what other open source modules or libraries are being used in those projects and probably wouldn't think to check or to support those developers. The user front-end is visible, but the stack of dependencies often isn't and these days no software is a monolith. How many end users would think about donating to Qt directly, or alsa, or libusb?
This is one of the major universal gaps in FOSS. I have a yearly reminder set to donate, and a list of projects within it — I do it this way because a) every project I've encountered only offer MONTHLY recurring, which is stupid as fuck because b) no I'm not fucking donating the $5 a month minimum to dozens of projects and c) larger donations usually have lower fees (e.g. donating $60 usually has lower fees than 12 x $5); why the fuck would I give the banks 30% more of my donation than necessary?
Users shouldn't have to manually deal with this shit, and valuable projects shouldn't have to beg for pennies. There should be a FOSS payment management project that enables users to create an account, add ALL of the FOSS projects they use (or want to donate to), set a monthly / yearly contribution, and be done with it. Users can choose to allocate percentages or let the software divide the money between all of them evenly, including all of their FOSS dependencies.
If you don't want to pay banks, ask the devs for a crypto address perhaps