| 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. |