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A comment on Give away your code, but never your time. Parent comment

Re:Give away your code, but never your time by hartator on Sunday September 10, 2017 @07:17PM (#15214841)
The issue is donations don't work even if you have a large user base.
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Re:Give away your code, but never your time by notamy on Sunday September 10, 2017 @11:08PM (#15215617)
This this this. If you provide a service for free, the vast majority of your user base will never care about giving you money, and will just stop using your service and find another one if you try to start charging them for it instead of keeping it free. One of my side-projects has ended up here and it's been a huge pain to deal with.
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Re:Give away your code, but never your time by xfer on Monday September 11, 2017 @12:12AM (#15215845)
We are not talking about a service here, we are talking about OSS codebase and in my experience it does work.
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Re:Give away your code, but never your time by notamy on Monday September 11, 2017 @06:28AM (#15217413)
> We are not talking about a service here, we are talking about OSS codebase

IMVHO, these are the same thing for the purpose of this discussion -- providing something to others, free of charge.

> and in my experience it does work.

Good for you (no sarcasm meant). But sadly this doesn't really seem to 'scale' that well.

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Re:Give away your code, but never your time by hartator on Monday September 11, 2017 @12:30AM (#15215925)
What's your experience?
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Re:Give away your code, but never your time by xfer on Monday September 11, 2017 @12:46AM (#15215990)
In my experience, i donate to projects, which i use often/or build upon.
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Re:Give away your code, but never your time by jpttsn on Monday September 11, 2017 @02:24AM (#15216411)
That's nice of you. Is it enough to keep the projects alive?
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Re:Give away your code, but never your time by dom0 on Monday September 11, 2017 @10:23AM (#15218715)
My data point would be Borg Backup, which, if you were to consider Bountysource to be payment for development, is under-financed by perhaps a factor of 40. 80+ % of funding came from three organizations.

And what I've heard from other maintainers is that Borg seems to do comparatively well.

So no, if you think in terms of payment, donations do not work in the open source ecosystem.

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