So proud to have SerenityOS & Ladybird onboard Polar. You're such an inspiration and the community is incredible with talented & kind developers uniting to build something many deem impossible to begin with. Thanks for showing that those are the ambitions we should pursue.
Thank you! Important callout: We designed issue funding for maintainers & contributors vs. bounty hunters. We don't believe in traditional bounties. More on this here: https://polar.sh/polarsource/posts/introducing-rewards
That looks like quite an impressive output in that time!
It appears that there is now more of focus on subscriptions with tiered private content rather than the "funded backlog" mechanic highlighted in the announcement blog post, which I think is a good choice.
I think that you can now act as a merchant of record is overall the biggest deal for me. The shaky legal situation of Github Sponsors once you offer rewards was always the show-stopper for not signing up with Github Sponsors for me. In case I pick up some significant open-source work again, I'll likely sign up with you! :)
P.S.: You have to do double-newlines if you want your list to render correctly.
Thank you! Yes, we've shipped most of the features mentioned as aspirations in that original post now. We'll soon share an updated one on the big goals for 2024 :)
Agree. I love our issue funding feature (now with contributor rewards too), but it was always part of a larger suite of funding tools we wanted to offer & now can. Getting recurring funding/income (subscriptions) is definitely crucial.
Yes, completely agree re: merchant of record. I've chatted with hundreds of open source maintainers and this has been a big pain point & concern for many. So we wanted to address it. As a platform, we can work with tax professionals & lawyers to help solve this once vs. N times for each maintainer standalone (an impossible burden).
I think seeing it as Patreon for open source is fine, as Patreon's offering is quite ill-suited for OSS (e.g. bad/abandoned API), leaving a lot of room in that niche.
As far as I can tell you can still contribute financially via Polar.sh without having to subscribe.
Birk from Polar here. We're building a platform for open source developers offering better funding & community tools. We're building it open source too: https://github.com/polarsource/polar
Hey! More funding options for open source is incredible.
Have you thought about opening up the platform to more than just Github? Having Github be the sole source for all open source projects is not very healthy for the ecosystem. There are other platforms like Codeberg and Sourcehut.
Yes, supporting more platforms is definitely something I see as part of our mission and long-term development. Started with GitHub since it's where most open source initiatives are hosted + analysis on large registries, e.g npm, pypi, confirmed that almost all of them where.
We're big fans of other platforms and looking forward to expand our support. But main focus now is helping open source developers on GitHub get meaningfully more funding & helping more than a few work on it full-time to even start small businesses. Once we've achieved that & proved our product can make a big difference, it's time to expand.
I understand and agree with the sentiment, but "why only GitHub?" comments are practically at the top of every similar HN thread. There's certainly no harm in asking.
The question strikes me as naive though, akin to asking "have you thought about using precious capital and momentum on .00001% (clearly exaggerated) of the DVCS market?"
The sad truth is "healthy for the ecosystem" isn't really profitable. I'm sure supporting other platforms is harmless in a roadmap/backlog, but seems like wasted effort early on in a company's development to split their focus.
If we don't fight this concentration of power, we're doomed to a Microsoft future. You might make good profit for a few quarters on the way there, but "not healthy for the ecosystem" is a gross euphemism for what's at the end of that road.
I'm not sure I agree, and as a rule of thumb don't really see much value in the arguments of those who seemingly can predict the future, especially when spreading FUD is the primary mechanism for supporting their prediction.
Cool to see it's open source! I don't have time right now to go through the codebase, so hope you don't mind if I ask you instead. What are you using "Act on your behalf" GitHub permission for?
Often I want to fund a PR in someone else’s project. Please don’t only make tools available to repo owners. Let us crowd fund work without the maintainers taking the lead. Sometimes the maintainers don’t have time or will to coordinate that, even if they will take the effort to click the merge button on PRs.
It can lead to difficult situations for maintainers, where they were not willing to accept some work and didn't have the chance to express this (yet) (lack of time for instance), and now they have a work that somebody else paid for but didn't really want to accept but rejecting it could be harder, emotionally. So you would need at least an okay from them.
I know those things must be accounted for. However I believe there’s a strong opportunity there. Many projects will accept PRs and merge them, but not take much lead on the project and soliciting particular contributions top-down, or promoting community requests into top down calls to action. And they already field PRs from people paid to produce them (a lot of open source contribution happens on company time)
I would even be happy to fund the work done in a fork until the maintainers decide or not to accept the PR. Whether the PR gets merged upstream is sometimes a secondary concern. The bounty for this work in a fork should still be advertised by community in upstream repo though (inside an issue ticket etc)
Will expand as we can with Stripe. Long-term, in order to expand truly world-wide, I think we'll need to integrate support for other payment providers too. Definitely something we want. Just a question of short-term capabilities & main priority being to reach a v1 that truly makes a dent in open source funding. Expanding markets, platforms and more once we have.
I think you're underestimating the amount of friction that requires and as a result how many don't bother. Let's remove the friction entirely and see what happens.
> 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.
Great thread and feedback re: administrative considerations. I believe it's our job at Polar to streamline this as much as we can leveraging Stripe Tax, Atlas and more. Of course, it's a massive topic and each country is unique, but give us time and we'll hopefully make things easier than they are today within OSS.
Re: expectation around getting the same $ as for a paid salary as an engineer today. We cannot expect it 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. In addition, we want to support maintainers being able to set explicit "goals" (Kickstarter). You can achieve this today by adding such context as you add Polar to certain issues, but we can streamline it even further.
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.
