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by arnath 696 days ago
The $400/month doesn’t account for their labor, does it? I feel like that’s why people donate personally
2 comments

Yeah, but they specifically don’t want that:

> No, this doesn't violate our policy of "no paid development", because donations are just that - donations. We will still not honour bug bounties or similar, and still not use our collective finance here for paid development.

This requires them to agree on how to pay out the money, which sounds like more trouble than it's worth.
IMO, there's nothing worse than paying people too little money. Well, other than unevenly paying everyone money.

"But it's $100 a month they wouldn't have had!" Sure, but now there's something to value your time and effort against, and it will not stack up favorably.

> IMO, there's nothing worse than paying people too little money.

In a for-profit project, I'd agree. Jellyfin isn't though, and they're pretty up-front about that, so "paying too little" doesn't really apply to the people who end up contributing.

You do not want your volunteers looking at the effort they put in and the money they get back for it. It's going to create negative feelings, and at the very least performance will suffer for a while. It's more likely that it'll cause a permanent problem instead, possibly even driving away volunteers.
> You do not want your volunteers looking at the effort they put in and the money they get back for it.

Why not? I think it's good for everyone to evaluate what you're spending your time on, and if that time is time well spent.

What do you mean with "the money they get back for it"? It's a FOSS project that doesn't pay for engineering hours from volunteers or anyone. It's literally $0, and everyone contributes to Jellyfin with the expectation of getting back exactly $0.