[boxcarr]

No money goes to a repository that doesn't participate in StackAid. Whatever is allocated to them from a subscription, gets reallocated after a certain period of time.

We are busy thinking through the best way to provide controls around allocation including specifying repositories/organizations you don't want to fund. This feedback is what we wanted to hear before we embarked on an approach.

Some organizations might also specify that they don't ever want to receive money, and allowing us to avoid waiting to reallocate the money intended for their repositories. This is another option we're planning on exposing.

[nathancahill]

Essentially, developers/project have to opt-out from participating on your site.

This is the problem that these "fund open source" projects run in to time and time again. Gittip (if I remember correctly) had the same issue. You're accepting funds under the name of various open source projects but not necessarily funding them. Often developers aren't even aware of the parallel funding channel and are rightfully upset about it.

I'm not saying your intentions are bad, and as an open source developer I'd love for a funding model that worked. I've just seen tens of different iterations on this same idea and none have stuck.

[boxcarr]

I don't think it's analogous to gittip where someone is attempting to send funds to a particular repository or organization, and, I assume, you don't know the status of your funds.

When subscribing to StackAid, you indicate that you'd like to support your dependencies. It's hopefully clear that their dependencies have to participate to receive their allocation. We're also upfront that not all OSS projects are interested or currently have a relationship with StackAid. As a result, allocation amongst dependencies will shift depending on the OSS project interested in participating, and that's an important feature that sets it apart from other funding models.

All of that said, we've tried to be clear in the messaging and setting expectations. We're very much open to feedback to improve what we communicate.

[joshmanders]

I think the issue is you're accepting the funds for a project without their approval and doing with it as you please.

As a product developer wanting to support I would have to make sure all my dependencies accept StackAid before I'd even use it.

As an open source developer I'd be pissed to find out that my project had $1k in funds held by some rando company in my name.

[dcow]

> As a product developer wanting to support I would have to make sure all my dependencies accept StackAid before I'd even use it.

Why?

[Cayde-6]

Let's say I have dependencies A, B, C, D, and E.

I absolutely love A, B, C; they're critical to my project, the maintainers put pour their own time and effort in, and I want to make sure they get my support. Dep D is pretty good and I wouldn't mind throwing a bit their way too. E is some wrapper lib (or maybe a company-backed package) that I don't care to support monetarily.

Since I want to support 60-80% of my deps, something like StackAid sounds attractive; I don't have to set up and maintain individual (potentially recurring) donations to each. I set up $100/mo to be distributed, feel good about doing my part, and go back to work.

Turns out, only E is collecting their StackAid, for whatever reason. My $100/mo is all going to them. Nothing is going to any of the others, let alone the packages I definitely wanted to support in the first place. I think I've donated, so I don't think to seek projects' alternative donation channels to get the money into their pockets, so they don't see a dime.

The only solution is to go through all of my dependencies to see which ones are actively using StackAid and decide if it's a sufficient set before donating through them.

[dcow]

It seems very unlikely, in the long run, that people/projects that need it would leave reliable income on the table. Maybe this problem exists until people know what stackaid is, but I have a hard time believing this is an issue with the model, generally.

[joshmanders]

For reason I stated after that, but not in my own context but their context.

[Aeolun]

Doesn’t it make more sense to only send money to repositories that signed up in the first place?

That might mean the first people to register get a whole bunch of money at the start, but that just seems like an incentive to sign up.

[nevernude]

That is effectively what happens. Unclaimed funds are reallocated after a few months to projects that have been claimed. Like you said, that's a good incentive to sign up sooner rather than later.