Polar v1.0: Let’s Fix Open Source Funding

https://blog.polar.sh/polar-v1-0-lets-fix-open-source-funding/

by patrick91 • 3 years ago

168 135 3 years ago

blog.polar.sh

mfts0• 3 years ago

The vision for the v1 is spot on. There were some attempts to turn the open source ecosystem into a creator economy - they are so similar but…

The big BUT is that software needs to be maintained whereas a video once uploaded on YouTube doesn‘t need to be edited again.

I have a feeling that Birk and the Polar team have the right insights to build the right tools to serve the specific needs of open-source software maintainers.

birk32• 3 years ago

Hey, Birk here (founder of Polar). Thank you so much @patrick91 for sharing our post here and thank you @mfts0 for the kind words.

Completely agree. I believe open source – as one of the largest and most important ecosystems in the world – is deserving of having a thriving "creator economy". Combined with it being a win-win for the users (businesses and individuals).

But such a platform needs to be bespoke for open source and its nuances vs. focused on content creation. It can't be a silver bullet solution either. All projects are different. So with Polar, we aim to build out a suite of all the possible value-add offerings, but allow maintainers to experiment, tweak and adapt to make it fit their initiatives and communities.

We have our work cut out for us. It's going to be insanely hard and fixing funding is the holy grail, but it's an important mission to pursue and I'm convinced a creator economy will form since current models are not beneficial to anyone. Just a matter of who & how. That's why I think it's crucial we're building it open source ourselves to truly build in public and serve maintainers through quick iterations and based on their needs, what's working etc. Fun times :-)

iamflimflam1• 3 years ago

Definitely a problem that needs to be solved. And the current donation/patreon/coffee mechanism just doesn't work.

The problem is that I don't know if people/businesses are really willing to pay the actual cost of getting things done.

I'm not even sure people even appreciate the work that is involved in most of their requests - how many times have you looked at some commercial software and had the "could build that in a weekend" reaction.

My other concern is around expectations. I've always tried to be very clear with any donation type thing that it's a donation. There's no obligation created on my part to provide any services or support. Directly coupling payments to requests might turn this into much more of a "I paid you to do this, why isn't it done yet".

bruce511• 3 years ago

> I don't know if people/businesses are really willing to pay the actual cost of getting things done.

ooo, ooo, I know... (hand up) - pick me... pick me... Short answer, no the're not.

The ones that are demonstrate their willingness to do so by, you know, spending money on proprietary software. I'm as happy as the next guy to make use of Open Source software, but it either works for me (no money necessary) or it doesn't (in which case I'll spend the money, with, you know, an actual business...)

Ok, cynic mode off, but let's be honest - there's a new "solution" to this problem like every other week. They all want to funnel money between the mythical person who wants to pay, to the mythical developer who wants to receive. All the other methods have failed, but apparently the problem is not the lack of people _willing_ to pay, but the fact that it's "too hard to pay"? I gotta say, after all these attempts, you would think one of them would have succeeded, unless, perhaps, aside from a few anecdotes, the actual pool of payers doesn't exist.

I wish you well, I really do, but I fear you're solving the wrong problem. Trouble is the right problem isn't solvable. But maybe, just maybe, if you solve the wrong problem enough, then maybe something of substance will happen.

I could go on about how most OSS developers don't _want_ to be paid. Because getting paid tiny amounts is a hassle which exceeds the income. So sure, guarantee me 10K a month for more than a year, and maybe it's worth the effort of accounting, and taxes, and obligations, and deadlines, and people complaining after the fact, before the fact, during the fact. But for a few hundred $ here and there - pass...

Cynic mode back on - another month, another startup planning to solve this "problem". Good luck!

birk32• 3 years ago

I spoke to a lot of companies in the early days of Polar. 90% of them said the same things.

1. Sponsorship is hard to sell internally. Only possible to get small budgets with the motivation of advertising towards developers (be it their product or hiring).

2. "We'd love to invest more, but we don't know towards what, what it will be used for and how that in turn benefits us which is needed to unlock more capital internally".

3. Once I pitched Polar, they got excited about how it could address #2 and all mentioned cases where they had been blocked by OSS issues or where they had feature requests. Not being able to address those themselves.

There is a lot of unnecessary friction today to sponsor specific features, issues or milestones – despite such being a lot easier to sell internally because they're tied to businesses needs. Polar aims to change that + gives maintainer(s) complete control to ensure it aligns with their goals and direction of the initiatives.

I'm not even sure people even appreciate the work that is involved in most of their requests

Absolutely. I think this is solvable though, e.g giving maintainers the ability to set goals for certain features, milestones or issues being one.

But, we cannot expect it to match an hourly salary as a paid engineer from Day 1. It's a new pattern. However, since maintainers are in complete control (it's not a traditional bounty service) sponsored issues that are accepted should align with efforts the maintainer wants to pursue too. Before they got $0. Now, they better know what their users want and can get them to sponsor efforts that align with theirs.

My other concern is around expectations. I've always tried to be very clear with any donation type thing that it's a donation. There's no obligation created on my part to provide any services or support. Directly coupling payments to requests might turn this into much more of a "I paid you to do this, why isn't it done yet".

Completely agree.

With Polar, maintainers are in complete control. They can decide which issues they want the Polar badge to be embedded on to whether the amount pledged is shown or not (since it can apply such pressure). In combination, we don't have this feature today (early alpha), but we want to make it super easy for the maintainer to accept/deny pledges in their admin. To setting thresholds and more, as mentioned earlier.

Our goal with Polar is to empower you as a maintainer and give you all the tooling to manage this with ease.

jph2• 3 years ago

I'm your target and I don't exactly understand what you're writing.

For example, I want to donate $100 toward Rust Rocket version 1.0.0.

Can Polar help with this goal? If so, what's my next step?

birk32• 3 years ago

Sorry about that, but happy to clarify anything.

You can pledge behind any open source issue that's on GitHub today. Just simply need to replace github.com in the URL with polar.sh or goto polar.new and drop the link.

We'll then reach out to the maintainers if they're not on the platform. Will soon ship so that an automatic comment is made (once). We don't want to create spam in the issues.

tomcam• 3 years ago

I really wish that had been, say, within the first 3000 words of the homepage. In fact, I think they would make a perfect lead. I literally had to go to the comments, page here to understand what was going on.

mustache_kimono4• 3 years ago

This may sound crazy, but I think the right model for open source funding is charging for updates. Red Hat has actually shown us the way. Developed world Ubuntu/Red Hat/SUSE users should pay $~20/year for access to all releases, $5 of which goes to the distro, $5 which goes to the base system/core utilities, and the rest should fund your particular OSS apps/frameworks/supporting apps running above the base layer.

Yes, obviously donation/sponsorship doesn't work, but I'm not sure pay per issue resolved is the best model either. Good apps shouldn't be punished for having few issues, or needing few features.

People should be able to opt in, but I think opting in at the distro level is the right choice as it would create a broad base of support. Of course, there will be those that don't want to pay, but I think a premium model for power users and enterprise customers makes sense. These premium users could have access to beta/nightly channels, early SRPMS/src debs, and priority or triaged issue/PR resolution?

Are there issues to be resolved? Yes, of course. How to divide payments to apps, and within app communities, but these aren't insurmountable problems. Canonical, etc., could simply set standards and require app communities to explain any variance from those standards.

MildRant• 3 years ago

I have 0 doubt in my mind that it could cost 1 dollar and most people wouldn't pay.

mustache_kimono4• 3 years ago

Which is entirely fair for some users who need less, but it would remove the talking point "We support OSS" while doing nothing. If "Google pays $25 million in OSS fees to...", we definitely know they care.

"People won't pay" is absolutely fine for users who simply need a barebones systems and never need a priority ticket re a Postgres issue, or a priority update.

I actually think its fine to create two classes of users -- those that pay a modest amount, and those that pay nothing. Perhaps the lesson is those that pay a modest amount get modestly more service, and those that pay nothing should have no expectations. Perhaps those persons who contribute to OSS or develop karma within OSS would receive a gratis memberships?

traviswt• 3 years ago

Won't this just encourage maintainers to sit on issues... just waiting for the bounty to increase? They might even purposefully introduce painful but simple bugs just to push consumers to pay to have them fixed.

habosa• 3 years ago

Would be cool if bounties could have an expiration date. I’ll pay $100 if issue X is fixed by date Y. Probably more reflective of business value too, since if an issue isn’t fixed relatively quickly I’ll have to build my own workaround.

cuu508• 3 years ago

Another kind of problem would be when someone pledges a big sum for an obscure feature, a first-time contributor writes a (technically perfect) PR for it. Maintainer does not want to merge it, because the feature does not align with maintainer's project goals. But not merging will now look like a dick move, as it denies the PR author the compensation.

rglullis2• 3 years ago

Then the payment can go to a fork. If the maintainer really wants to keep his vision for the project and others are literally voting with their wallets for something else, why would that be a problem?

birk32• 3 years ago

With Polar today only the maintainer receives the pledges once an issue/feature is completed. However, we're working on the ability for maintainers to split that with any potential contributors. It's definitely an important feature and part of our model. Just something we decided to scope out from the initial launch – in the interest of launching early and building in public.

An important distinction between Polar vs. traditional bounty services though and regarding your point is:

Everything goes through the maintainer(s) and we're equipping them with the insights, capital and tools to reward their contributors. While bounty services allow anyone to post a bounty and anyone to pursue it. However, ultimately it needs to be reviewed, merged and maintained indefinitely by the maintainer(s). By ensuring it all flows via maintainer(s) it:

1. Rewards maintainers as well – key given their efforts

2.Guarantees maintainers are aligned & behind pledges first. Combined with in control on how to expose, delegate and reward it. Avoiding unnecessary friction, bad faith and overhead if such alignment is first made during PR.

supriyo-biswas• 3 years ago

Bad incentive structures are everywhere though, including at corporations where people design "cool" architectures which fail, and then swoop in to save the day.

RobotToaster2• 3 years ago

If they were simple to fix other people would just fix them an make a PR.

If a project became notorious for pulling stuff like that, and rejecting pull requests, people would most likely just make a fork.

I guess that also raises the issue of who gets paid if a third party pull request fixes an issue.

birk32• 3 years ago

Polar could certainly be abused that way, but I think it's a theoretical problem more than a realistic one.

Open source operates in a marketplace today (just not an economic one) so market dynamics would flush this out imo. Intentional bugs, stale development etc would lead to user churn and/or forks. I'd argue faster within OSS where users can see how things are handled.

Having said that, I certainly think the risk of it and fraud more in general increases once an economic marketplace is formed. However, I think those problems are then "good" problems to have and easy ones to fix, e.g flagging repositories with unusually high ratio of repeat pledges, velocity of bugs etc.

brigadier1322• 3 years ago

I have had situations where i wanted to use an open source tool that was somewhat obscure and i would have paid $300-400 an hour for consulting from the maintainers/creators and could not get in contact with anyone. So if you create open source software i recommend posting a link to a consulting business with some minimum price that you are satisfied with, even if its something like $1k an hour.

mschuster914• 3 years ago

Been on both sides of that end, the problem is that especially outside of the US offering paid services comes with some serious challenges on its own:

- registering a business entity costs money and (especially in dysfunctional bureaucratic hellholes) time

- you can be held completely liable for whatever you offer if you don't take excruciating care with the legalese fineprint

- it's a complete nightmare on tax filings (e.g. in Germany you can't have your taxes handled by Lohnsteuervereine if you have a side business, i.e. income from sources other than regular employment)

- you often lose anonymity because PayPal discloses your real name to everyone knowing your email address, or SEPA payments requiring your name

- people can and will fuck with you just because they can or because they hate you for whatever reason. Anything from mass reporting you to Paypal over death threats to outright SWATting you.

artdigital• 3 years ago

You don’t need to register a business for a bit of side money. Even in Germany, you don’t need to register as “eingetragener Kaufmann” unless it’s, you know, actually a proper side business and ticks some criteria.

Going down that road, there’s heaps of people doing consulting as sole proprietor (or e.K. In Germany) without getting sued or stuck in tax hell

I think you’re looking at things a bit too pessimistic here

carlosjobim5• 3 years ago

I don't really get the sentiment on tax fillings. Experts in most other fields manage to do the odd job here and there for a few hundreds, why shouldn't programmers be able to? Either on the books or off the books.

people can and will fuck with you just because they can or because they hate you for whatever reason. Anything from mass reporting you to Paypal over death threats to outright SWATting you.

That sounds like straight paranoia. All businesses are online today on Google Maps etc. Does your local hot dog stand get swatted on a regular basis?

j1elo5• 3 years ago

But the time I might spend working on consulting inquiries is not time spent on the daily job, on the oss project itself (especially if the request is about something not aligned with the roadmap of the project), or on relaxing during free time.

As an oss maintainer, the way I see it is that unless the purpose itself behind the oss code is to make money via consulting, offering consulting is usually not in the interest of the people behind the code.

It is oss, after all. Other companies can form around the project and provide consulting support.

brigadier1322• 3 years ago

There are a million reasons why people write open source software. From what I read, there is a sizable group of creators that make no money from their creations and actually struggle to survive despite having such in-demand skills and I was simply suggesting one way they could get by.

on the oss projeft itself (especially if the request is about something not aligned with the roadmap of the project)

I disagree that it wouldn't be valuable. You can discover that things you believed were simple to understand were actually complicated or you can discover new use cases you had never thought of. But most importantly if you have no money now you can get money.

carlosjobim5• 3 years ago

Wait, if you are getting paid for adding features or fixing stuff on the OSS code, that's time spent on the project. And chances are that if somebody is willing to pay something, many other people will find use for it.

thayne2• 3 years ago

My open source work is a hobby. If you want to give me some money for something I would do anyway, I probably won't say no. Or if you and people like you paid me enough consistently that I could quit my day job and focus completely on my OSS projects, then I would probably do that. But even for $1k an hour I don't know that I would want to deal with contractual obligations for my hobby project.

Of course that isn't the case for all projects, but you can't always assume that the maintainer is willing to accept payment if you are willing to give it.

I think a better model might be to have consultant companies that employee people to fulfill bounties on various projects, and possibly handle building and distributing custom forks if the upstream maintainer is unresponsive (or just takes longer than the customer wants) or doesn't want the change upstream.

birk32• 3 years ago

My open source work is a hobby. If you want to give me some money for something I would do anyway, I probably won't say no.

Polar is designed for maintainers and to give them complete control. So you can decide which issues Polar should be embedded on, i.e issues that align with your long-term goals and direction for the initiative. So you can get sponsorship for efforts that align with your goals.

Or if you and people like you paid me enough consistently that I could quit my day job and focus completely on my OSS projects, then I would probably do that. But even for $1k an hour I don't know that I would want to deal with contractual obligations for my hobby project.

That's the goal, but give us time :-) Pledges/sponsorship towards issues today (Polar v0.1) are not a contractual obligation. As we expand the services we offer, maintainers will have control which ones to leverage. So it's completely up to you what to offer and what not based on your desires and needs. Hopefully, however, Polar at least gives you all the tooling to craft such services and subscriptions.

password43213• 3 years ago

So a VC-funded company expected to produce unicorn returns is going to accomplish this when non-profits haven't?

It doesn't seem logical but I hope someone can pull it off!

I would like to learn more about the background of the founders - what they've already done in any way related to this. Why does Polar have a chance?

rgbrgb• 3 years ago

Luckily you do not need credentials to solve problems with software.

Good luck to the founders, it’s a worthy problem.

hobofan3• 3 years ago

Luckily you do not need credentials to solve problems with software.

No, but you should at least provide a perspective why you will succeed (where many others have tried and failed).

The only thing I see different in their approach is trying to "empower maintainers to become entrepreneurs", in a market in which there is no actual demand (= willingness for companies to pay cash). And they try to do that with a offering that I think maintainers couldn't care less about:

- GH Issues shows all the info you need to get an overview over your backlogs funding = there ain't any amounts of relevance

- maintainers are usually quite aware of all the external dependent issues of the project, and if you really want to get an overview, a tracking issue is easy enough to create

cloverich• 3 years ago

You don't, and this isn't directed at OP, but the industry is ripe with hubris. Having a track record of success is less about pedigree, and more about building off of prior learnings and experience to solve complex problems. And leveraging your network when relevant.

Thinking that those things aren't an important asset is common and IMO a flaw.

mustache_kimono4• 3 years ago

So a VC-funded company expected to produce unicorn returns is going to accomplish this when non-profits haven't?

Business accomplishes something non-profits haven't isn't exactly a stop the presses event?

password43213• 3 years ago

I clearly failed to sufficiently emphasize the VC unicorn part enough, my bad.

Polar is a Stripe/Square for GitHub issues, expected to charge enough fees to pay for a portfolio of failed startups and still make their investors money.

giancarlostoro• 3 years ago

I mean, before LetsEncrypt, if someone pitched a non--profit that lets you have free SSL certificates for your website, would you have responded similarly? Probably...

madeofpalk• 3 years ago

If someone pitched a for profit LetsEncrypt I would response similarly!

theamk• 3 years ago

The key is "VC-funded company", LetsEncrypt was never one.

birk32• 3 years ago

That would be me :-) My name is Birk Jernström (@birk on Twitter). Been coding since I was 10y. Co-founded an e-commerce platform called Tictail back in 2011 which was acquired by Shopify in 2018. Worked there for 3y as Director of Product on the Shop.app team. In hindsight building platforms that empowers creators (one form or another) is what I love to do. As a self-taught developer thanks to open source, I'm incredibly excited to now focus on OSS with that mindset.

I'm biased of course, but I think the fact that we're VC-funded and for-profit is a good & important difference here. Donations & sponsorship are great when they happen. Problem is they rarely do. In order to drive meaningful (full-time work) capital to OSS initiatives, I believe it has to charge for add-on value and that such services and subscriptions are mutually beneficial. See mkdocs-material as a prime example.

We're building a platform to make setting up, deploying and managing such services seamless for both maintainers and their customers. Completely up to the maintainers to craft their services & subscriptions using those features to fit their initiative & community. I think such a platform is missing today and our model aligns us with maintainers – we don't get paid until they do. So it's good that we're intentionally for-profit :-)

Yes, it's going to be incredibly hard and the odds are stacked against us, but I believe this needs to exist. Maintainers deserve a platform where they are not limited to any given model, but free to experiment, try and optimize what works best for them and their communities.

password43213• 3 years ago

it's going to be incredibly hard and the odds are stacked against us

Thanks much for taking the time to share; I agree and wish you luck:

Success to you & your company!

hobofan3• 3 years ago

See mkdocs-material as a prime example

Then I hope you provide a better system for dealing with (or allowing the maintainers to deal with) taxes. Unless the maintainer of mkdocs-material somehow funnels the earnings through a US company, I'm almost certain that it's impossible to offer what they offer while being based in Germany without violation tax rules (as what they are offering is clearly a sale and not a donation, and Github doesn't issue any sales tax).

xNeil• 3 years ago

Sounds awesome! Love your idea, but I was wondering as to what would happen if GitHub built this into their platform directly, bypassing Polar. What does Polar have that GitHub doesn't, in case that happens?

some_furry2• 3 years ago

How do you plan to prevent enshittification of your service over time?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification for background of this term

The reason I'm asking is: I believe VCs increase the risk of enshittification.

Incumbents that employed a "pay a bounty for maintainers to fix the issue" model would simply pocket the bounties for issues that never got picked up. Is this a risk for yours too?

kouteiheika• 3 years ago

I'm biased of course, but I think the fact that we're VC-funded and for-profit is a good & important difference here.

For-profit is not necessarily a problem here; the VC-funded part it.

How on earth are you going to extract enough value out of it to generate a ROI that VCs are expecting? As a purely bootstraped company this could have legs, but as a VC-backed company? I'm very doubtful.

Nevertheless, best of luck to you!

jph2• 3 years ago

If anyone wants to see Polar in action on a GitHub issue, I'm experimenting with Polar on my Architecture Decision Record repo:

https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture-decision...

(I'm on the fence about the value of Polar for this kind of issue... see what you think)

birk32• 3 years ago

That's awesome and thanks for sharing @jph! I'd love to hear your feedback and how we can make Polar better for you. I'm always available to chat. @birk (twitter), birk [at] polar.sh or on our Discord.

dboreham• 3 years ago

Fix an unfixable thing?

Edit: to expand -- these initiatives seem to always be cooked up by people who do not write software, don't fix bugs, don't hire software developers. They never work because adding a feature to a product or fixing a bug isn't a commodity item that you can just buy with a click and spread cost between many parties.

The result is that most of the prospective purchasers end up having an easier path to get what they want, which is to fork and fix themselves (usually via in-house devs already on staff).

vendiddy• 3 years ago

I will on occasion email an OSS maintainer offering to pay for some improvement or consulting. But I don't do this often because of the friction. In other I can't even find their email, but then it feels awkward to publicly post this in a GH issue.

birk32• 3 years ago

Completely agree. I've run into this many times too and having talked with a lot of companies, I know the same is true for a lot of them. As Polar removes the friction here, it will hopefully accelerate our ability to sponsor such efforts

posnet• 3 years ago

I was very confused, I thought this was about the polars, data science/data analytics toolkit. I know names are hard, but maybe pick something more distinct.

fizzynut• 3 years ago

Interesting idea, A small but impactful change I would make would be to change dollar amounts into tokens. e.g. 1 token = $50.

A company might want to buy 1000 tokens and allocate tokens individually to specific issues, but they also might want to put tokens in a pot the maintainer can access to "spend" on issues they want to prioritise for the project or allow them to "spend" tokens at a specific rate, etc.

It also means that money is committed upfront by the companies, i.e. the money is real and exists, has been set aside for this thing and in case of a dispute polar can make decisions, etc

birk32• 3 years ago

Thank you! Excellent feedback and completely aligned with the intent here.

It also means that money is committed upfront by the companies, i.e. the money is real and exists, has been set aside for this thing and in case of a dispute polar can make decisions, etc

Glad to say, that's how it works already. A pledge is paid upfront and the capital resides within the Polar platform account with Stripe until the issue is marked completed. Then it's transferred to the maintainer minus fees (10%). Or refunded to the backer after 6 months (a timeframe we'll experiment with). We're going to build a "Polar balance" so individuals or companies can top-up their account, automatically disperse it etc too.

So the only question is whether it needs to be abstracted into a "token" concept or can simply continue to be $ upfront. Definitely some advantages and opportunities with "token" vs. money though. Just a bit mindful of the associations people have with "token" specifically from the crypto world.

they also might want to put tokens in a pot the maintainer can access to "spend" on issues they want to prioritise for the project or allow them to "spend" tokens at a specific rate

Love this! https://github.com/orgs/polarsource/discussions/858

RobotToaster2• 3 years ago

Premium access. Educational material

Arguably, putting a restrictive licence on manuals makes something not free software https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.html

yoavm2• 3 years ago

I'm sorry, but I would never give money to an open-source project through a VC-backed company that takes a 10% commission. I could maybe live with it if it was 0.5%, but heck I'll just find the maintainer and wire them the money somehow. Github Sponsorship takes 0% from private accounts.

I could very much be wrong about this, but the whole thing feels like it's coming from the perspective of someone thinking "I've heard about OSS, let's see how I can monetize it", rather than "I've participated in the OSS world for a long time, and I have an idea that can improve it".

charcircuit3• 3 years ago

You can make more money on a platform that has a higher fee if that platform has a better brand, has less friction, has more users, is easier to setup, etc.

reaperman2• 3 years ago

Yeah but 10% is still very greedy, assuming they become the dominant platform for this. And if they don't become the big platform for this then they aren't adding the value which justifies 10% anyways.

skrebbel2• 3 years ago

It’s not about giving money, it’s about buying features, services and support from the maintainers.

biscuitech• 3 years ago

Doesn't open collective already do this though? You can fund specific goals iirc.

harlanji• 3 years ago

Patreon seems like the next best thing that has peoples' cards and their cut is 10%.

Credit card fees alone were universally 2.9% + some cents last I checked.

It's interesting that GitHub takes 0%, but that's clearly subsidized by something and I'd like to know what before I sign up to that ("clearly," because of transaction fees they're paying).

10% is a reasonable cut if they can help maintainers get from $0 to $1 and beyond.

yoavm2• 3 years ago

So every time I'm sponsoring someone on Github, Microsoft loses some money? That's even better!

38• 3 years ago

10% is a reasonable cut if they can help maintainers get from $0 to $1 and beyond.

how you can say this with a straight face is beyond me.

VoxPelli3• 3 years ago

StackAid is better in this regard:

1. Is bootstrapped rather than VC backed as far as I understand 2. Treats itself as one dependency among many, so it isn’t favored over other receivers 3. Rather it is penalized against other receivers as it at most will get 7.5% of one’s monthly donation: https://www.stackaid.us/

rglullis2• 3 years ago

Now that the company is funded, are you hiring? I'd love to work for a company that has the sole goal of making FOSS sustainable, I even wrote a bit about it here: https://raphael.lullis.net/open-source-funding/

birk32• 3 years ago

Really liked the blog and this article too https://raphael.lullis.net/can-foss-eat-the-world/

Lot of overlap :-)

Would be great to connect. Just hired for the open role we had, but we’ll grow more. You can reach me at birk[at]polar.sh

ushakov• 3 years ago

Why would I use this instead of the usual ways (GitHub Sponsors, PayPal, Patreon, OpenCollective)?

toyg2• 3 years ago

From what I understand, Github Sponsors is not granular: you either subscribe to a project or you don't. Polar seems to allow for issue-specific funding and other more granular bits.

tibor_a• 3 years ago

We did this in 2010 :). In the years since there has been many similar attempts. This one, however, seems to have all the important things right. Congrats for the funding and good luck!

birk32• 3 years ago

Thank you! If you are who I think you are we’re already connected, but otherwise I’d love to chat: birk[at]polar.sh

avodonosov• 3 years ago

I wish success to initiatives like that.

From the article I didn't understand the model. Or how it is diffirent from existing projects like https://bountysource.com/ and others.

jonas-w• 3 years ago

It sounds like bountysource, but bountysource seems to have stopped paying bounties. Found these two links on the Wikipedia Article for Bountysource:

[CRITICAL] Bountysource Escrow, Complain @ dfpi.ca.gov, 18.05.2023 - https://github.com/bountysource/core/issues/1539

What is wrong with your support and cash out process?, 20.06.2021 - https://github.com/bountysource/core/issues/1586

birk32• 3 years ago

Working on docs for the site. Clear we can do a better job explaining this.

Until then, I answered this thread on the topic the other day which hopefully clarifies: https://github.com/polarsource/polar/discussions/391#discuss...

toyg2• 3 years ago

Props for trying, the software world needs something like this.

However, I don't see how this is not fundamentally just a Github feature. They don't have it now, but if Polar gets any traction, they'll implement it pretty swiftly and probably eat your lunch.

api• 3 years ago

Does MS want to incentivize really professional polished open source?

This is such a no-brainer thing for GitHub to do, I've really wondered why they never did it.

It'd also be an obvious thing for Patreon to consider getting into, though it's maybe outside their core expertise.

birk32• 3 years ago

Thanks toyg! Re: GitHub, I answered another comment on this note here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36736826

mintone• 3 years ago

Great to see more in this space. We've been working on the same problem with https://www.ringerhq.com for the past ~year and have seen great success with specific projects. We're changing our approach slightly to give contributors and maintainers more tools after receiving feedback on specific features. If I can reiterate one piece of advice: listen to the community!

birk32• 3 years ago

Big fan of what you're building with Ringer. Would love to chat more if you're interested. You can reach me at birk [at] polar.sh

woodruffw• 3 years ago

I’m glad to see more people tackle the problem of open source funding; at the same time, I’m not convinced that adding VC money to the problem makes things any better.

There’s a secret third thing that never seems to get mentioned: not pittances through donations and not speculative investment from VCs, but plain old paid engineering. Most open source maintainers don’t want to be “entrepreneurs”; they just want to be paid an (approximately) fair rate for their time. Hiring them (or paying them for consultation time) achieves this.

birk32• 3 years ago

I don’t think we’re in disagreement as it relates to getting maintainers better funding. We absolutely agree a core unlock there is to recognize the value-add services on top and being able to create services and subscriptions around those. Such as consulting, paid support etc. To subscriptions with premium content and more. We’ll provide all of the tools to make it easy, and it’s up for each maintainer to craft what suits them, their desires and community.

I think we both agree this should exist and could be helpful to many maintainers who likely want it and would benefit from it?

So re: VC. I simply wouldn’t be able to afford pursuing this platform without VC backing. Zero chance. It’s going to take a lot of time, people, lawyers, tax professionals, operations to sales and more to do right and world-wide. Not to mention, since it’s an unproven model in an ecosystem without much economic activity, it’s incredibly risky and will take time before it creates such an economy. To me that’s the beauty and hope VC brings. Supporting entirely new models, markets and innovations that take time to build.

I love indie/bootstrapping, but it encourages working with incremental changes within existing & large markets because you need revenue to exist in large scale from Day 1 through which you can mine.

VoxPelli3• 3 years ago

I think I prefer StackAid, it funds the entire chain of dependencies and doesn't lock anything down: https://www.stackaid.us/

birk32• 3 years ago

Huge fan of StackAid! Glad you're using it! Just to clarify and out of curiosity, what do you mean with "doesn't lock anything down" in the context of StackAid vs. Polar?

VoxPelli3• 3 years ago

It doesn’t paywall anything, you can’t say that only people who support you on StackAid gets A or B.

(One idea I think we toyed with at Flattr, which was also a flat fee donation system, was to potentially enable people to lock something down on whether you donated to anything at all, but ultimately decided that the internet was meant to be opened and thus we added mechanisms to Flattr to make it really hard to abuse it as a paywall, which eg Germans loved but most Americans was really confused by )

bogwog2• 3 years ago

This is interesting and I genuinely hope you succeed because OSS funding is important.

I have some questions:

1. Can anybody place a bounty on any issue? That seems like it could take control away from the maintainer. Is there a way for a maintainer to reject an issue bounty, so they can keep control over the direction/architectural decisions of the project?

2. Could someone pledge money towards a milestone (e.g. the next major version) rather than specific issues?

3. Are you offering any kind of business support to maintainers, such as reaching out to business users on their behalf to negotiate a sponsorship/support contract/bounty/etc? The sales part of all of this seems like it's the biggest challenge for OSS projects where it's just a few engineers who don't have the time or skill to do sales.

birk32• 3 years ago

Fantastic questions & feedback – thank you @bogwog!

1. Yes they can, but they remain anonymous and private only for the maintainer to see and take action on. Currently, we don't have automation for explicit rejection/approval, but something we want to add. Completely agree re: maintainer control – it's a core principle of ours.

2. Not today, but I absolutely love this idea. Added it to the backlog: https://github.com/orgs/polarsource/discussions/855

3. Agree. We have a lot of plans here for the future. Definitely think this is a huge opportunity long-term.

homanp• 3 years ago

Flawless execution

laurent123456• 3 years ago

What's different from the other crowdsourcing platforms for open source?

birk32• 3 years ago

I answered this thread on the topic the other day which hopefully clarifies: https://github.com/orgs/polarsource/discussions/391#discussi...

ducktective2• 3 years ago

Nice idea and good luck :)

Join our Discord to discuss ideas, early design proposals and upcoming features

Yeah, no...disheartening to see this many FOSS developers opting for Discord for realtime chat.

doakes• 3 years ago

Why disheartening? What would you prefer?

ducktective2• 3 years ago

It's a walled garden that was hostile to third-party clients from the start. It asks for phone number to sign up. The client is slow (both web version and electron version). Ghost notifications and spams in DM. No way to find channels to join.

Matrix, IRC...at least set up a bridge to one if you are going Discord

PaulDavisThe1st• 3 years ago

https://ondsel.com/blog/software-bounties-are-a-dumb-idea/

Conclusion:

Bounties are a lousy foundation for sustainable development of large projects like FreeCAD. They typically represent a gross underestimation of real work required to solve a problem, commonly miss a bigger picture, and encourage worst software development practices.

Growing larger is fun but also really overwhelming. Most ambitious projects that aim to stay afloat will have to experiment with different approaches to getting funded on a regular basis and come up with their own mix of solutions. It’s that or perish.

birk32• 3 years ago

will have to experiment with different approaches to getting funded on a regular basis and come up with their own mix of solutions

Couldn't agree more. Sponsoring issues/features is our 1st offering with Polar, but our goal with v1.0 is to have a suite of add-on services that maintainers can sell on-demand or as part of a subscription.

We started with issues/features since they're universal to all open source initiatives and where demand is first represented & communicated most often today. Lots of challenges to solve there too be sure, but solvable.

jehna1• 3 years ago

Polar asks you to grant "act on your behalf" permissions to your Github. As someone who has both professional and open source projects at Github, that's a definite deal breaker

birk32• 3 years ago

Unfortunately, this is the default by GitHub and their OAuth prompt and nothing we can change. See https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/37117

Most of our API integration is purely about synchronising repositories, issues & PRs (read-only). With the exception of 2 things. 1) Inject the Polar badge. We then edit the issue body to append it at the bottom. 2) You can explicitly post a comment as yourself via Polar when you badge an issue, but this is entirely optional and merely a convenience feature would you want to. Requires manual & clear action.

senden9• 3 years ago

I did come here to post the same reaction. I saw the OAuth prompt with "act on your behalf" and intermediately closed the browser tab. When I want to take a look at something new I do not want ti give it what looks like nearly full access on my account.

meagher2• 3 years ago

Best case: Maintainers paid, GitHub acquires Polar.

Worst case: Maintainers paid, GitHub copies Polar.

birk32• 3 years ago

Here's my thinking re: GitHub on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36736826

meagher2• 3 years ago

No doubt Polar can be a better product overall and focus on things that GitHub would never do. GitHub has a major distribution advantage though. Could see them adding something basic into GitHub Sponsors along with first-party UI that shows up on all issues.

Curious what you think about subscriptions versus one-time payments. Seems like Polar is going more for the latter. Would love if this was normalized and could see it leading to more money coming in overall. My concern is that subscriptions are great for predictability (company sponsors $500/mo) and without that I need to find a way to re-acquire money to pay rent every month.

ThinkBeat• 3 years ago

(Old man rant) For fuck's sake.

If I wanted to be a social media influencer, I'd be on Instagram / OnlyFans.

If i wanted to spend my time "an entrepreneur with superpowers to convert the community into backers", I would be running a company / start up doing sales.

I wish to write code.

Some of that code is open source. Some of it I write because someone pays me to do so.

I dont have to do any sales and that is fantastic.

So far nobody has given me money for my open-source code and that is fine.

I write my open-source tools because I admire those who came before me and all they have contributed to the world. It is a civic duty.

They gave us operating systems, compilers, databases, libraries.

When someone creates a new thing and its 90% derived from free tools with a bit of code sauce / UI on top it, call it open source and then run around wanting to get paid for it they are in the wrong pasture.

If you are wanting to make billions of dollars and you create some form of "open source" system but you get angry if someone uses it and does make money from it, you are in the wrong pasture.

Contemplate Linux, (Open)*BSD, GNU tools, Postgres and everything open source you use to make your product and none of which you have paid for. Imagine if Theo had $1 for every OpenBSD install. (I love OpenBSD) Id owe him at least a few hundred dollars. On aggregate he would be at least a millionaire.

For people who do want to inject money into open source that is great. Dont pick me.

Pick projects that are vital in the stack and who are underfunded.

birk32• 3 years ago

And I salute you for it, truly.

Intent here is not for each commit across all of OSS to be paid for. Or that every maintainer has to charge for add-on services.

Polar is designed for maintainers who either 1) spend an enormous amount of time in effectively unpaid support already or 2) want tooling to run an independent business around their OSS initiatives.

It’s not designed for everyone and you opt-in to use it (as maintainers, contributors or backers).

To me that’s the core trait of OSS: Freedom. Today, I don’t think maintainers have that freedom to easily pursue an independent business or get paid for support towards businesses without an insane amount of unnecessary overhead. That’s what we aim to change for those who seek it.

XCSme• 3 years ago

our $1.8M pre-seed round to help us pursue our mission of expanding the open source economy

$1.8M VC funding for what?

Polar v1.0: Let’s Fix Open Source Funding

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