Agree with everything you're saying, I really am surprised at how overwhelmingly positive the response has been for the most part on hacker news. I really don't see 99% of OSS project contributors making money from this, let alone enough money to make a living, but it's hard for me to interpret the response as much less than delusion.

People are probably going to get jealous/upset if they find out other contributors are getting more donations than them, especially if they feel their project/contributions are inferior to their own. A lot of people are suggesting they change things to make it so you donate to projects instead of individuals, but I feel this would be even worse. The politics of open source projects can already be big head aches, but throw money into the mix and it will get even worse, as someone will have to decide how to divide things up, and then we might get into a situation where people refuse to even contribute to a project unless they're guaranteed some sort of payment for their contribution.

It's obviously still a little early to be completely shitting on the idea, none of us really know what's going to happen, I just think everyone needs to temper the excitement a bit and take a moment for a reality check.

I generally share your concerns. Much of the current rewards in open source are intrinsic: the satisfaction of making something good, helping other people, the joy of working with others.

I think those incentives, to a pretty good degree, align with goals I have for software: for it to be high quality, holistically designed, and making the lives of the developers working on it more gratifying.

> There has always been a purity around writing open source software simply for the benefit of mankind.

At the same time, there is a downside to this purity. The freedom to spend time on open source "simply for the benefit of mankind" is a luxury only available to those who are already able to put food on the table.

I think this is a major reason why the open source demographics are aligned so strongly with traditionally privileged groups, and I think that's bad for humankind.

Pumping money into the system might help underrepresented groups participate in open source, which in turn means we'll get software that is better tuned to the needs of everyone and not just the privileged.

I probably wouldn't use GitHub sponsors either. I want to retain my sense of freedom over the direction I take my projects and I worry that cash payments would undermine that freedom and also undercut the intrinsic rewards I get for creating.

At the same time, I realize my choice to not take sponsorship is a luxury I have because I've got a fantastic day job and come from a position of privilege.

Very shortsighted view. The purity view is the thing that prevented open source from taking over for the longest time.

No, there will definitely be people making money from this. Say Evan You, creator of vue is making 18k a month in patreon https://www.patreon.com/evanyo. Why wouldn't people use github now instead?

> I will not be using github sponsors for my open source projects...

Why not? There's no shame in asking people to support your work if they are benefiting. In fact, some of the people using your projects might be making money from your work. To you it's about purity, to me it's about you letting yourself be exploited.

I’d be thrilled if people were making money from my work, that’s the point.

OK you should also get a part of that. Donations are very non commital for both sides. You aren't expected to do what your donors tell you to. It will help you spend more time on your projects. Like it's in the interest of the users to give you money.

It’s not in their interest to give me money, they have no interest in that at all. They simply want me to continue working and updating my project so they can keep making money.

I don’t need a part of their money. Those weren’t the terms that I put out my software with. Imagine if you had to donate money for every package and library you used. Building applications would get very expensive quickly, when it could just as easily be cheap and free.

Which is why it's optional.

Don't let them manipulate you. Assert your policy that they are paying for the software as it is at the time of donation. I would donate with the same thought without any expectations of further development because of my donation. Only that the software has already helped me in its current state.

Exactly this. The "purity" of OSS development needs to be reflected in the "purity" of donations for this to work. Small donations should represent nothing more than a token of appreciation. Large donations, well... money shouldn't buy project influence, though that is easier said. It's a complicated matter of corporate sponsored engineers contributing both good and bad (influence wise) patches back to OSS, but people need to make a living somehow.

Just wanted to add that you as a developer put the work up-front so there absolutely should be no expectation that the donation is for future work but instead for the work that has already been done.

I personally don't like this whole sponsorship thing. This sets up people to optimize for getting and retaining sponsors instead of doing things that they would have wanted. A better approach could have been to offer money o fix issue or implement feature. For example, you could file issue/feature request on a project where developer has indicated that they have no time to work on and then offer $1000 to fix it. This is small amount if you depend on it for your business. The developer can decide if its worth their time and interest.

You'd be amazed at how many people "make demands to the creator to implement some feature or fix some bug" already when they're not paying any money.