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0 pointsTAForObvReasons8y ago0 comments

> reasonably

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.

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git-pull8y ago

That evades the point and reintroduces the same thought pattern I've criticized in my original post.

> 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 funding is low, less than a fast food worker. The person running the operation couldn't even pay his own rent to run it out of an apartment.

Before we start slicing up the pie, we need to have the funds reach a point where they can sustain themselves. For instance, basic living expenses in midwestern US. Funds after administrative costs should be the pie.

We have to stop shaking down people who want to help open source when they ask for funding. It's as if whenever someone tries to fund an open source project or create a way to fix this problem funding in open source, they're hounded and dogpiled.

I've seen this sort of entitled, stingy attitude on the part of open source users, that despite using open source software to their benefit, those doing the work behind the scenes are shamed for trying to sustain themselves.

It's this strange double bind: first you want your software working, new features, and that bug fixed, but the one's facilitating that very thing for you can't have the material means to do it without being shook down.

When I see 10k in funding, less than poverty wage in USA, and people talking about it as if it was a prize pool instead of operating expenses, that's the mentality I'd like to see done more thoughtfully.

cavneb8y ago

You make some great points. I do have one correction though:

> Most of the previous sponsors were drawn into the social cause but not necessarily the practical effectiveness of the ads themselves

This is true for a few of the sponsors, but not the majority. The majority were drawn into Code Sponsor because it can be as effective as Google Ads, while 40% of the marketing funds go back into developers pockets.

Code Sponsor was never presented to sponsors as a charitable organization, nor did we try to present ourselves as such to the community.

Here is the gist that I shared with sponsors to explain how Code Sponsor worked:

https://gist.github.com/cavneb/a86a668063328de2f063ba9c7d078...

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