OpenCollective to help sustain the project and community

Community
17

thanks @gusaus and @robbt !

i agree that money collected through individual donations, and then split between multiple developers isn’t likely to let us quit our day jobs. See the very similar Azuracast project - it appears to have a larger user base, be closer to a final release, and all funds go to one single developer - and yet he appears to be making $84/month for all of his work.

However, the symbolic value of this money could be a useful organizing tool, and it’s better than a kick in the pants. Where I live, US$20 is a school teacher’s daily wage. I’m imagining a scenario in which we reached out to developers who have contributed to the project (such as @xabispacebiker and several others) to ask if they’d like to be a part of getting 3.0.0 shipped and if as a symbolic token of gratitude they’d like to be included in being paid via opencollective. if anything, the fact that it isn’t much money could help us not to fight …just brainstorming…

so, i’d vote yes to opencollective if we have clarity and transparency as to:

  • a process for entering into the group of devs who are getting paid. eg. if you’re contributing a minimum of insert criteria here, then email gusaus and he’ll get you set up.
  • we can agree from the start that this money is merely a symbolic token of appreciation, and that our main shared goals are the health of the community and quality of the software.

one last point:
i also agree that grant funding is both feasible, and much more likely to actually pay rent. that said, i personally do not plan to put time into grant writing until after my community radio station is squared away, pleased as punch running LibreTime 3.0.0+. I think we can (and should) release 3.0.0 without worrying about money, but that we will need to figure out funding in order to start the major post-3.0.0 refactoring that will be necessary in order to ditch Zend v.1, vastly improve the user experience (especially on cell phones), and modernize/simplify testing etc. To be clear, I’m not arguing for grant funding instead of donations. Both funding sources have their place.