In October, they brought in $7,437.20 from sponsors. They paid out $3,413.20 to open source developers.
40% was to be paid out to developers. I realize there are some "administrative costs" and it takes a while to ramp things up but that seemed like way too little being paid out.
On the other hand, that's $3,413.20 that otherwise might not have went into the pockets of developers so I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about Code Sponsor.
Specifically, this crab mentality of dashing hopes of someone ending up right side up on a side project or even a nonprofit. Why pick on the little guys who are just trying to get by, especially if they have a noble intention of funding open source projects.
This is something that we really need, and I feel larger organizations that fund open source - not naming names - aren't transparent or egalitarian enough with who and how they fund. So many people do open source and don't see a penny from it. In 2017, if you want to receive any funding for an open source project, you have to be in a certain social circle, very popular, or very fortunate.
There are organizations that horde millions in cash reserves and give six figures to people just for sitting on a board. Then, there are people just trying to bootstrap themselves on a shoestring budget to buy groceries and pay rent to their roommate. It is my sincere hope we are more generous to people just trying to scrape by and not trying to unduly hound them and guilt trip them into not being able to pay their basic living expenses.
$3,413.20 over a period of four months? Thankfully he also had a day job, because we also don't know if he had other developers, or what were his true needs were to be able to sustain his project.
If the split happened to be 80%/20% or 90%/10%, then no one would complain even if the author was pocketing $1M/mo. In fact, I and many other people would likely be ecstatic.
However, knowing the actual split, and knowing that the majority of funding didn't actually go to developers, it's a lot more difficult to make the social argument at this time. It necessarily falls back on the practical question of whether it is effective to advertise in the READMEs. Most of the previous sponsors were drawn into the social cause but not necessarily the practical effectiveness of the ads themselves.
Even though it's not a charitable cause, they are trying to make the same appeals. And if a charitable organization was eating away more than 50% of the donations in administrative costs, you would likely be very wary.
The reason I had a 40% rate was in hopes that I could make the business sustainable enough to pay me. Not once did I take a distribution.
It's a shame that Github is forcing Code Sponsor to shut down.
I encourage you to wait until Github's time is over, and then to try again.
Code Sponsor took the approach that scalable funding should come through marketing budgets, not charity. Companies pay developers to place a non-obtrusive, relevant and ethical banner on their repo or website and the developer gets paid on a per-click basis. The larger the repo, the more clicks they get. It is self-normalizing.
Thanks for the explanation
If so, I don't think GitHub has an angle to attack you.
A developer with a Commission Junction account could very well put CJ links in their README. That would not give GitHub a vector to attack CJ.
The few Code Sponsor ads I saw on Github were pretty benign, but I can understand why Github wants to keep them off of their platform.
When Eric is describing having to wake up at 5 am and work weekends to make Code Sponsor work even with the proceeds of 60% of all OS projects his ad network funded, it should be pretty clear the other 40% divided among many OS coders couldn’t be enough for their project’s development to feel sustainable.
As much as I commend Eric on trying to find a solution to OS maintainability, I think he actually just reinvented something already available to OS developers, a niche tasteful ad network, I.e carbon ads <https://carbonads.net> something which many OS projects with a large enough audience already include to support development.
What Code Sponsor is is a mashup of Carbon Ads, Open Collective and Read the Docs (with a hint of grassroots marketing demonstrated by Wesbos). The 40% was enough for developers. I paid one developer last month over $600. Two others earned over $400.
Finally, Code Sponsor was available to every open source project. The popularity of the project is what self-governed the amount of money they would receive.
Carbon Ads also does not provide any visibility into what is going on. I have taken extreme effort to give sponsors and developers full visibility into their traffic patterns. Daily statistics and charts. This allows sponsors to immediately know how their campaigns are doing and shift if necessary.
Carbon Ads is great, but they are a black box and sponsors want more.
I could see a correlation between posting to Hacker News and the amount of impressions/clicks for that day.
But it doesn’t mean that Codesponsor needs to shut down. They could easily check the referrer and show the ads only on npm, dockerhub, gitlab, hackage etc and they would still get good coverage.
I agree that this is a good idea, but open source exists on Github. Without their support, it just won’t happen.
Monetization is still a huge problem, just this is not the way to go about it.
Why is this not the right way to go about it? The “ads” were relevant, unobtrusive and ethical. There was never any click tracking, never any remarketing, nothing.
Code Sponsor provided the FIRST and ONLY means of scalable funding for open source projects. It was not depending on charity from others. It was a business transaction between sponsors and developers. The sponsors saw a return and the developers got paid to continue doing what they love.
If anyone else has a better idea, please share. Until then, I claim that it’s IS the right way to go about it.
That seems to an extremely fine distinction, bordering on one without any difference at all.
Here's an example of what it looks like:
[0] https://devchat.tv/js-jabber/jsj-281-codesponsor-sustaining-...
