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by ldubost
828 days ago
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You are right that there is a difference between products and libs and it seems difficult to get donations or yearly support for libs. Good that it's meant to be another option. I'd like to say that service has helped me get XWiki off the ground, for a product too, but that while you do it you need to have in mind "how to I make the product sustainable with recurrent revenue". For libs, I believe what you need to think about is who the lib maintaners are and in what context do they do it ? How many are freelancers ? How many employed ? One thing that you could do in your service is to allow for links to donations and maybe chip in extra in the service costs even if it's not demanded. I still think that the donation market can expand with open source funds. At XWiki we have a fund (for which we have a hard time completing the work of project sélection). One thing we miss most is knowing which projects really need to donations. As you say, it's hard to get the superiors to even give a donation. However if you can mask the donation in some "needed service" it can work. At XWiki we created open source extensions which are paying (not packaged for free). I'm not sure for libs it work though. If you are interested in how we got XWiki off the ground and funded, I had a fosdem talk about it. There are slides and video here: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-1830-20-y... |
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Indeed, I think my ideal target for the first beta users would probably be either small frameworks, or medium size plugins, etc. Frameworks are ideal because they normally have a large amount of contributors (so a lot of potential "helpers") and a lot of people that need support. They also may not have as much documentation as more mature frameworks and therefore possible more people that need help. Of course the end goal would be to work for all types of projects but instead of trying to build the "kitchen sink, I definitely want to concentrate on certain types of users first and get some feedback before moving on further.
As for donations, yes I was thinking the same. I was working on subscriptions (recurring donations) and one-time donations but I shelved this for now until I get some more testing done. I firmly believe (and feedback so far supports this) that people would prefer to use one platform and have one setup for things like that. Doesn't mean they HAVE to, but for people first setting up revenue generating tools, this could be a good plus for them. I also agree, I think a "tip" function could be a great idea and pretty easy to implement.
RE: funds - I shall have to look into this as another feature also, as I can definitely see the usefulness in this but requires some thought of how to implement, great idea!
Thanks again for your detailed feedback, it's much appreciated and hard to come by. It sounds like your project is doing very well, I'm very happy to hear! Massive congrats on building such a huge, useful and widely used software!
I just watched your video / presentation, very insightful and sounds like we're very much aligned in terms of ethos / reasons for getting into things. As for having worked with investors, I couldn't agree more about losing control and having misaligned goals, I am trying to avoid this, for now at least for those very reasons.