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A comment on Funding Yourself as a Free Software Developer.

Re:Funding Yourself as a Free Software Developer by ravenstine on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @12:10PM (#15971460)
I've been meaning to start giving more money to free software projects I've benefitted from. Sadly, a lot of them don't take donations or they use some convoluted payment processor. I would totally be willing to support a project through something like Patreon and pay something like $3 per minor release and $7 for a major release. This should be a no brainer for smaller companies that can only afford free software but also want that software to be well supported.

Even as an individual, I don't know why I haven't set up donations on my github projects. Some of them have several stars, and you never know who will buy you a beer or a coffee.

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Re:Funding Yourself as a Free Software Developer by tyil on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @04:45PM (#15974119)
Most people don't do it because it's effort that's not directly associated to programming. It's also easy to think that you won't get any payoff from the effort invested, since it's rare to see to begin with, and even more rare to see anyone making a decent living off of it.

More financial support to free software development would certainly be appreciated. Even a single cent just to show the developer you enjoy his software is a good incentive for a developer to keep going. It seems like most feedback developers get is negative, so anything positive is appreciated.

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Re:Funding Yourself as a Free Software Developer by beisner on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @12:19PM (#15971579)
Hmm the idea of a Patreon donation per minor version is actually very interesting....
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Re:Funding Yourself as a Free Software Developer by djsumdog on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @01:16PM (#15972215)
You can currently do that with Patreon. They support money per month or money per thing. David Firth does money per thing (video, music album, etc.) and you could easily do that with releases (although I'm not sure if you could do separate donation amounts per minor or major release).
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