Polar v1.0: Let’s Fix Open Source Funding
blog.polar.shI'm sorry, but I would never give money to an open-source project through a VC-backed company that takes a 10% commission. I could maybe live with it if it was 0.5%, but heck I'll just find the maintainer and wire them the money somehow. Github Sponsorship takes 0% from private accounts.
I could very much be wrong about this, but the whole thing feels like it's coming from the perspective of someone thinking "I've heard about OSS, let's see how I can monetize it", rather than "I've participated in the OSS world for a long time, and I have an idea that can improve it".
You can make more money on a platform that has a higher fee if that platform has a better brand, has less friction, has more users, is easier to setup, etc.
Yeah but 10% is still very greedy, assuming they become the dominant platform for this. And if they don't become the big platform for this then they aren't adding the value which justifies 10% anyways.
It's a smaller fee than Patreon.
What comparable creator platform takes less than 10%?
It’s not about giving money, it’s about buying features, services and support from the maintainers.
Doesn't open collective already do this though? You can fund specific goals iirc.
Sure but to my reading Polar has a much stronger “help maintainers become entrepreneurs” angle which seems like a novel approach to me.
StackAid is better in this regard:
1. Is bootstrapped rather than VC backed as far as I understand 2. Treats itself as one dependency among many, so it isn’t favored over other receivers 3. Rather it is penalized against other receivers as it at most will get 7.5% of one’s monthly donation: https://www.stackaid.us/
Patreon seems like the next best thing that has peoples' cards and their cut is 10%.
Credit card fees alone were universally 2.9% + some cents last I checked.
It's interesting that GitHub takes 0%, but that's clearly subsidized by something and I'd like to know what before I sign up to that ("clearly," because of transaction fees they're paying).
10% is a reasonable cut if they can help maintainers get from $0 to $1 and beyond.
So every time I'm sponsoring someone on Github, Microsoft loses some money? That's even better!
I don't get this comment.
I host all my OSS projects on Github so I can have free and unlimited CI. I have access to Github Copilot for free. I use VScode which is arguably a great software all day, every day.
All this because Microsoft has a shit ton of money and they can afford funding the OSS community as a whole.
And you don't think there might be a reason for all that (and that reason might correlate with people being happy to get one over them)?
Suddenly I want to support a lot of small projects so they eat more transaction fees.
Presumably they don't charge credit cards individually...
> 10% is a reasonable cut if they can help maintainers get from $0 to $1 and beyond.
how you can say this with a straight face is beyond me.
HN is supposed to be a site where participants each other's opinions.
Your response feels disproportionate. As if this person is suggesting giving up your liver is a reasonable price.
So a VC-funded company expected to produce unicorn returns is going to accomplish this when non-profits haven't?
It doesn't seem logical but I hope someone can pull it off!
I would like to learn more about the background of the founders - what they've already done in any way related to this. Why does Polar have a chance?
That would be me :-) My name is Birk Jernström (@birk on Twitter). Been coding since I was 10y. Co-founded an e-commerce platform called Tictail back in 2011 which was acquired by Shopify in 2018. Worked there for 3y as Director of Product on the Shop.app team. In hindsight building platforms that empowers creators (one form or another) is what I love to do. As a self-taught developer thanks to open source, I'm incredibly excited to now focus on OSS with that mindset.
I'm biased of course, but I think the fact that we're VC-funded and for-profit is a good & important difference here. Donations & sponsorship are great when they happen. Problem is they rarely do. In order to drive meaningful (full-time work) capital to OSS initiatives, I believe it has to charge for add-on value and that such services and subscriptions are mutually beneficial. See mkdocs-material as a prime example.
We're building a platform to make setting up, deploying and managing such services seamless for both maintainers and their customers. Completely up to the maintainers to craft their services & subscriptions using those features to fit their initiative & community. I think such a platform is missing today and our model aligns us with maintainers – we don't get paid until they do. So it's good that we're intentionally for-profit :-)
Yes, it's going to be incredibly hard and the odds are stacked against us, but I believe this needs to exist. Maintainers deserve a platform where they are not limited to any given model, but free to experiment, try and optimize what works best for them and their communities.
> See mkdocs-material as a prime example
Then I hope you provide a better system for dealing with (or allowing the maintainers to deal with) taxes. Unless the maintainer of mkdocs-material somehow funnels the earnings through a US company, I'm almost certain that it's impossible to offer what they offer while being based in Germany without violation tax rules (as what they are offering is clearly a sale and not a donation, and Github doesn't issue any sales tax).
Polar can cover the sales tax like Lemonsqueezy by being a merchant of record.
That's one way to do it, but it's extremely challenging. The sales tax can depend on where the buyer is located, where the buyer is from, where the seller is located, and where the seller is from. There are ~1000 jurisdictions for each of those four choices, so that makes for ~1000^4 different cases to handle. You'd also have to register as a merchant in each juridiction, and know the rules for when you have to start remitting sales tax to that jurisdiction. There are whole businesses built around managing that complexity, e.g. Avalara, Vertex and TaxJar (now part of Stripe). Maybe just offload that burden to one of them and focus on building your core innovation.
> Maybe just offload that burden to one of them and focus on building your core innovation.
I don't think that's incompatible with their model. They absolutely could use Stripe to accomplish this transparently and not sacrifice any user experience.
Yes, absolutely. Polar is built with Stripe today and will continue to be – leveraging Stripe Tax and additional offerings they have as we scale to build compliant & great user experiences at the same time.
Yes, as we expand into services that will be key. Working with tax lawyers both in the US & EU along with Stripe to make sure we make it easier for maintainers than what it is currently via other platforms.
Unless they are a 503 (c) it wouldn't be a donation even if they gave nothing in return.
> I'm biased of course, but I think the fact that we're VC-funded and for-profit is a good & important difference here.
For-profit is not necessarily a problem here; the VC-funded part it.
How on earth are you going to extract enough value out of it to generate a ROI that VCs are expecting? As a purely bootstraped company this could have legs, but as a VC-backed company? I'm very doubtful.
Nevertheless, best of luck to you!
Sounds awesome! Love your idea, but I was wondering as to what would happen if GitHub built this into their platform directly, bypassing Polar. What does Polar have that GitHub doesn't, in case that happens?
Thank you xNeil! Focus & velocity is key. This roadmap is our #1 priority, sole focus and ultimate business. It would be GitHub's #1058 priority – if ever.
I love GitHub. They're the foundational layer of development in the ecosystem. However, an economic platform like Polar's intentions long-term is an entirely separate layer on top imo. Requiring a whole suite of different product offerings and operations tailored to it. Such as taxes, accounting, payments, customer management & communication to supporting platforms beyond GitHub, i.e GitLab, Hugging Face and more. Sure, there is overlap, but mostly the two are separate layers with substantial requirements of their own.
GitHub should focus on their core layer of development. It's massive and ever changing (especially now). Offering users to expand their "hub" through app integrations and partnerships. Combined with leveraging their investment arm & rev share with third parties – as all other platforms – to gain upside in other economic models/layers built on top. I think that's the better and more likely strategy for GitHub to continue on.
How do you plan to prevent enshittification of your service over time?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification for background of this term
The reason I'm asking is: I believe VCs increase the risk of enshittification.
Incumbents that employed a "pay a bounty for maintainers to fix the issue" model would simply pocket the bounties for issues that never got picked up. Is this a risk for yours too?
It's 100% the responsibility of the founders and leadership.
I think enshittification is more a consequence of either 1) current metrics not matching costs 2) loss of long-term vision of further innovation (often once it's no longer founder led) 3) no competition.
It's either an attempt to make up for the bleeding short-term (1), unclear path of expansion (2) or an excessive ability to maximize costs due to no alternatives on the market (3).
In many ways, I'd argue VCs decrease the risk of enshittification or delay it. They're comfortable funding the delta between current metrics vs. costs (1) – up to a point, of course. They also love to fund competition in proven markets (3).
> Incumbents [...] would simply pocket the bounties for issues that never got picked up. Is this a risk for yours too?
This is a combination of the problem not having been solved at scale and of such actors needing cash (1). At Polar now, we have runway for years even without $1 in revenue – thanks to VCs.
Of course, I understand what you mean and ultimately the problem in our industry arises when "the party stops". At some point current metrics & costs need to balance. However, I'd argue this is the responsibility of the founders. VCs will always be the voice of "invest in growth" because it's fundamentally what their capital is for. Founders need to know how to leverage it, track current metrics and obsess about how things are progressing to match up eventually and spend + invest accordingly. Combined with having a long-term mission & vision spanning beyond quarterly goals. Enshittification is duck tape for lacking these things and ultimately fuel for competition.
So to answer your question, I believe I'm to be held accountable and not VCs in case we enshittify the product. Having worked at Shopify, I'm inspired by their 100-year mission and being founder+product led and obsessed about merchants – knowing money comes as a reward and is not the pursuit. Having also started a company before, I've learned to "not get drunk" by the party.
We're building towards something new in the pursuit of creating an independent pathway towards careers and small businesses within OSS for those who want to pursue it. It will take time and it will cost a lot of money to make this bet. It would have been impossible without VCs and I've chosen really great ones who align with this mission. I'm beyond thankful for them making this possible because that's what it boils down to.
Finally, we're open source so you can hold us accountable :-) https://github.com/polarsource/polar
> it's going to be incredibly hard and the odds are stacked against us
Thanks much for taking the time to share; I agree and wish you luck:
Success to you & your company!
Luckily you do not need credentials to solve problems with software.
Good luck to the founders, it’s a worthy problem.
> Luckily you do not need credentials to solve problems with software.
No, but you should at least provide a perspective why you will succeed (where many others have tried and failed).
The only thing I see different in their approach is trying to "empower maintainers to become entrepreneurs", in a market in which there is no actual demand (= willingness for companies to pay cash). And they try to do that with a offering that I think maintainers couldn't care less about:
- GH Issues shows all the info you need to get an overview over your backlogs funding = there ain't any amounts of relevance
- maintainers are usually quite aware of all the external dependent issues of the project, and if you really want to get an overview, a tracking issue is easy enough to create
> no actual demand (= willingness for companies to pay cash)
My company would be a lot more willing to pay a one-time bounty to fix a bug that is impacting us or build a feature that would help us then to pay a continual donation or sponsorship for uncertain benefit.
> My company would be a lot more willing to pay a one-time bounty to fix a bug
And how often do you do that today, in practice? If the pain is big enough, then I'm sure you tried to reach out to maintainers directly and see if there is a way for them to do paid work.
I think you're underestimating the amount of friction that requires and as a result how many don't bother. Let's remove the friction entirely and see what happens.
Shared some more context re: this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36755640
You don't, and this isn't directed at OP, but the industry is ripe with hubris. Having a track record of success is less about pedigree, and more about building off of prior learnings and experience to solve complex problems. And leveraging your network when relevant.
Thinking that those things aren't an important asset is common and IMO a flaw.
> So a VC-funded company expected to produce unicorn returns is going to accomplish this when non-profits haven't?
Business accomplishes something non-profits haven't isn't exactly a stop the presses event?
I clearly failed to sufficiently emphasize the VC unicorn part enough, my bad.
Polar is a Stripe/Square for GitHub issues, expected to charge enough fees to pay for a portfolio of failed startups and still make their investors money.
I wonder what enshitification will look like if this business survives? Higher fees, something to do with advertising, crypto/NFT bullshit, garden walling/API restrictions, etc...
History has shown these types of things are 100% inevitable with these types of businesses if they manage to survive, so it's smart to think about them well in advance and have an exit strategy if you decide to depend on them.
Answered another comment re: enshitification here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36755232
I think this is a fair critique. I have my own -- "This is why this won't work..." take, and I must admit that it's a VC funded startup does make this seem less viable. It's only that I think exactly the same re: FOSS non-profits.
I mean, before LetsEncrypt, if someone pitched a non--profit that lets you have free SSL certificates for your website, would you have responded similarly? Probably...
If someone pitched a for profit LetsEncrypt I would response similarly!
The key is "VC-funded company", LetsEncrypt was never one.
I have had situations where i wanted to use an open source tool that was somewhat obscure and i would have paid $300-400 an hour for consulting from the maintainers/creators and could not get in contact with anyone. So if you create open source software i recommend posting a link to a consulting business with some minimum price that you are satisfied with, even if its something like $1k an hour.
Been on both sides of that end, the problem is that especially outside of the US offering paid services comes with some serious challenges on its own:
- registering a business entity costs money and (especially in dysfunctional bureaucratic hellholes) time
- you can be held completely liable for whatever you offer if you don't take excruciating care with the legalese fineprint
- it's a complete nightmare on tax filings (e.g. in Germany you can't have your taxes handled by Lohnsteuervereine if you have a side business, i.e. income from sources other than regular employment)
- you often lose anonymity because PayPal discloses your real name to everyone knowing your email address, or SEPA payments requiring your name
- people can and will fuck with you just because they can or because they hate you for whatever reason. Anything from mass reporting you to Paypal over death threats to outright SWATting you.
You don’t need to register a business for a bit of side money. Even in Germany, you don’t need to register as “eingetragener Kaufmann” unless it’s, you know, actually a proper side business and ticks some criteria.
Going down that road, there’s heaps of people doing consulting as sole proprietor (or e.K. In Germany) without getting sued or stuck in tax hell
I think you’re looking at things a bit too pessimistic here
> Even in Germany, you don’t need to register as “eingetragener Kaufmann” unless it’s, you know, actually a proper side business and ticks some criteria.
You absolutely can do a Gewerbeanmeldung. The problem is, without a Kapitalgesellschaft ("Mini GmbH" and similar), you're fucked liability-wise. Your entire private assets can be taken if you end up bankrupt.
I don't really get the sentiment on tax fillings. Experts in most other fields manage to do the odd job here and there for a few hundreds, why shouldn't programmers be able to? Either on the books or off the books.
> people can and will fuck with you just because they can or because they hate you for whatever reason. Anything from mass reporting you to Paypal over death threats to outright SWATting you.
That sounds like straight paranoia. All businesses are online today on Google Maps etc. Does your local hot dog stand get swatted on a regular basis?
> That sounds like straight paranoia. All businesses are online today on Google Maps etc. Does your local hot dog stand get swatted on a regular basis?
I've been on the Internet for decades and seen pretty nasty shit. If you want to know what German trolls are capable of, search for "Drachenlord". Additionally, I'm an active antifascist and received my fair share of death threats. So yes I'm biased.
I think those are two very different sides of the internet.
There are easy solutions for the problems you listed. The easiest being to not use your real name to accept SEPA payments. You can put anything you want there on the invoice, the banks just care about the account number.
> The easiest being to not use your real name to accept SEPA payments. You can put anything you want there on the invoice, the banks just care about the account number.
Is it wise though? Absolutely no. All that is is asking for a lot of trouble. Alone because a SEPA identifier is enough to cause people to order an awful lot of bullshit using it and you'll be stuck unwinding fraudulent pizza and dildo deliveries pretty much forever until you change the bank or have them create a new account.
I have a lot of shit to dunk on Bitcoin and others, but the one thing these got right is that no one could simply claim they had an authorization to your funds.
What? The only thing people can do if they have your bank account number is send money to that account. There's nothing else they can do.
But the time I might spend working on consulting inquiries is not time spent on the daily job, on the oss project itself (especially if the request is about something not aligned with the roadmap of the project), or on relaxing during free time.
As an oss maintainer, the way I see it is that unless the purpose itself behind the oss code is to make money via consulting, offering consulting is usually not in the interest of the people behind the code.
It is oss, after all. Other companies can form around the project and provide consulting support.
There are a million reasons why people write open source software. From what I read, there is a sizable group of creators that make no money from their creations and actually struggle to survive despite having such in-demand skills and I was simply suggesting one way they could get by.
> on the oss projeft itself (especially if the request is about something not aligned with the roadmap of the project)
I disagree that it wouldn't be valuable. You can discover that things you believed were simple to understand were actually complicated or you can discover new use cases you had never thought of. But most importantly if you have no money now you can get money.
Well for that subset, I would agree with you. I mean come on, you are making oss stuff that provides some value for some people, and you are struggling to get a decent income from other channels? It would make sense to try and maximize the surface area of all potential income generation activities.
But that's just a small subset of all cases, as you mention.
I've lived the opposite case: consultancy was the idea, but not enough people came in, with not enough frequency.
Talking generally, it feels ironic that if difficult to understand things get polished and ironed out, that source of revenue might and probably will dry out. So an incentive would exist to keep consultancy needs existing. (Edit: I am just digressing on this last thought, not talking about my particular personal experience)
Wait, if you are getting paid for adding features or fixing stuff on the OSS code, that's time spent on the project. And chances are that if somebody is willing to pay something, many other people will find use for it.
Sounds good in isolation, but as others have mentioned, in some (most?) places, accepting money like that would be considered a professional activity, and you suddenly must worry about a host of other distracting things that take time, effort, and preoccupations: incorporating, tax filings, invoicing.
Or you could pay someone to manage it for you, but you're still suddenly involving yourself in stuff that you hadn't even had the interest or intention to do anyways.
In my European country, for example, having a regular source of revenue [1] requires registering with the government as an independent contractor, which costs a bit less than 400€/month. Then you will need to extend invoices, with the consequence of having to worry about VAT (consulting is a service? I guess so it incurs in VAT), make VAT tax filings each trimester, store invoices for several years in case they are requested.
One day you look back and think "but, but, I just wanted to spend a couple hours per week on small consulting requests!". As a consequence, people are greatly discouraged if it's not going to be a serious path to make serious money.
[1]: Yes, revenue, i.e. regardless of profit, and in theory also regardless of amount, albeit in practice they won't enforce it for measly revenues if they are roughly below 1000€/month.
> In my European country, for example, having a regular source of revenue [1] requires registering with the government as an independent contractor, which costs a bit less than 400€/month.
I apologize, but I actually can't believe that. Maybe you have misinterpreted some regulation or base it on hearsay? If that is truly the case, then your main goal right now should be to escape to a free country as soon as you can.
Either way, some paid OSS work can't count as regular income. But if the place where you live is like what you told, the taxman is probably gonna come and get you, to milk some money no matter if you followed the rules or not.
I made a 100€ mistake in there. I misremembered the amount to be 365€, but it actually was 265€ when I worked as such, some years ago. Fares and benefits have been slowly rising over time, and seems that now the rate is 294€ [1].
There is a lot of contention between organizations of self-employed people and the government. Of course, paying that amount regardless of actual profits seems crazy. On the other hand, it goes to pay the public healthcare services which allows things like spending whatever amount of time needed for treatment in a hospital and not pay a single dime for it. All a matter of pros and cons.
[1]: https://www.healthplanspain.com/blog/expat-tips/1762-self-em...
> minimum monthly social security payment for the self-employed currently around 294 euros per month
Another issue is that software developers are sometimes paid highly and are in top tax bracket. In New Zealand the top marginal tax rate is 39% (although I am guessing most software devs would be on 33% (Over $70,000 and up to $180,000) even at 33% it is not so motivating to be offered $1000 if $330 of that immediately disappears as taxes. Plus the hassle of recording amounts and declaring them - uggggh.
In California that top marginal tax rate is 13.3% so not quite the same problem as some other countries.
> it is not so motivating to be offered $1000 if $330 of that immediately disappears
I get how 1000 is better than 670, but on the flip side, that's 670 extra that you didn't have before, right
If it's about where the line falls, I guess you could only accept a minimum of $1492, so after the 33% cut you get $1000 :)
But yeah, as mentioned in my other sibling comments, I believe that the administrative burden itself might be enough of a barrier for lots of people to prefer skipping the problem altogether.
Great thread and feedback re: administrative considerations. I believe it's our job at Polar to streamline this as much as we can leveraging Stripe Tax, Atlas and more. Of course, it's a massive topic and each country is unique, but give us time and we'll hopefully make things easier than they are today within OSS.
Re: expectation around getting the same $ as for a paid salary as an engineer today. We cannot expect it 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. In addition, we want to support maintainers being able to set explicit "goals" (Kickstarter). You can achieve this today by adding such context as you add Polar to certain issues, but we can streamline it even further.
My open source work is a hobby. If you want to give me some money for something I would do anyway, I probably won't say no. Or if you and people like you paid me enough consistently that I could quit my day job and focus completely on my OSS projects, then I would probably do that. But even for $1k an hour I don't know that I would want to deal with contractual obligations for my hobby project.
Of course that isn't the case for all projects, but you can't always assume that the maintainer is willing to accept payment if you are willing to give it.
I think a better model might be to have consultant companies that employee people to fulfill bounties on various projects, and possibly handle building and distributing custom forks if the upstream maintainer is unresponsive (or just takes longer than the customer wants) or doesn't want the change upstream.
> My open source work is a hobby. If you want to give me some money for something I would do anyway, I probably won't say no.
Polar is designed for maintainers and to give them complete control. So you can decide which issues Polar should be embedded on, i.e issues that align with your long-term goals and direction for the initiative. So you can get sponsorship for efforts that align with your goals.
> Or if you and people like you paid me enough consistently that I could quit my day job and focus completely on my OSS projects, then I would probably do that. But even for $1k an hour I don't know that I would want to deal with contractual obligations for my hobby project.
That's the goal, but give us time :-) Pledges/sponsorship towards issues today (Polar v0.1) are not a contractual obligation. As we expand the services we offer, maintainers will have control which ones to leverage. So it's completely up to you what to offer and what not based on your desires and needs. Hopefully, however, Polar at least gives you all the tooling to craft such services and subscriptions.
Definitely a problem that needs to be solved. And the current donation/patreon/coffee mechanism just doesn't work.
The problem is that I don't know if people/businesses are really willing to pay the actual cost of getting things done.
I'm not even sure people even appreciate the work that is involved in most of their requests - how many times have you looked at some commercial software and had the "could build that in a weekend" reaction.
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".
>> I don't know if people/businesses are really willing to pay the actual cost of getting things done.
ooo, ooo, I know... (hand up) - pick me... pick me... Short answer, no the're not.
The ones that are demonstrate their willingness to do so by, you know, spending money on proprietary software. I'm as happy as the next guy to make use of Open Source software, but it either works for me (no money necessary) or it doesn't (in which case I'll spend the money, with, you know, an actual business...)
Ok, cynic mode off, but let's be honest - there's a new "solution" to this problem like every other week. They all want to funnel money between the mythical person who wants to pay, to the mythical developer who wants to receive. All the other methods have failed, but apparently the problem is not the lack of people _willing_ to pay, but the fact that it's "too hard to pay"? I gotta say, after all these attempts, you would think one of them would have succeeded, unless, perhaps, aside from a few anecdotes, the actual pool of payers doesn't exist.
I wish you well, I really do, but I fear you're solving the wrong problem. Trouble is the right problem isn't solvable. But maybe, just maybe, if you solve the wrong problem enough, then maybe something of substance will happen.
I could go on about how most OSS developers don't _want_ to be paid. Because getting paid tiny amounts is a hassle which exceeds the income. So sure, guarantee me 10K a month for more than a year, and maybe it's worth the effort of accounting, and taxes, and obligations, and deadlines, and people complaining after the fact, before the fact, during the fact. But for a few hundred $ here and there - pass...
Cynic mode back on - another month, another startup planning to solve this "problem". Good luck!
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.
I’m glad to see more people tackle the problem of open source funding; at the same time, I’m not convinced that adding VC money to the problem makes things any better.
There’s a secret third thing that never seems to get mentioned: not pittances through donations and not speculative investment from VCs, but plain old paid engineering. Most open source maintainers don’t want to be “entrepreneurs”; they just want to be paid an (approximately) fair rate for their time. Hiring them (or paying them for consultation time) achieves this.
I don’t think we’re in disagreement as it relates to getting maintainers better funding. We absolutely agree a core unlock there is to recognize the value-add services on top and being able to create services and subscriptions around those. Such as consulting, paid support etc. To subscriptions with premium content and more. We’ll provide all of the tools to make it easy, and it’s up for each maintainer to craft what suits them, their desires and community.
I think we both agree this should exist and could be helpful to many maintainers who likely want it and would benefit from it?
So re: VC. I simply wouldn’t be able to afford pursuing this platform without VC backing. Zero chance. It’s going to take a lot of time, people, lawyers, tax professionals, operations to sales and more to do right and world-wide. Not to mention, since it’s an unproven model in an ecosystem without much economic activity, it’s incredibly risky and will take time before it creates such an economy. To me that’s the beauty and hope VC brings. Supporting entirely new models, markets and innovations that take time to build.
I love indie/bootstrapping, but it encourages working with incremental changes within existing & large markets because you need revenue to exist in large scale from Day 1 through which you can mine.
If anyone wants to see Polar in action on a GitHub issue, I'm experimenting with Polar on my Architecture Decision Record repo:
https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture-decision...
(I'm on the fence about the value of Polar for this kind of issue... see what you think)
That's awesome and thanks for sharing @jph! I'd love to hear your feedback and how we can make Polar better for you. I'm always available to chat. @birk (twitter), birk [at] polar.sh or on our Discord.
This is interesting and I genuinely hope you succeed because OSS funding is important.
I have some questions:
1. Can anybody place a bounty on any issue? That seems like it could take control away from the maintainer. Is there a way for a maintainer to reject an issue bounty, so they can keep control over the direction/architectural decisions of the project?
2. Could someone pledge money towards a milestone (e.g. the next major version) rather than specific issues?
3. Are you offering any kind of business support to maintainers, such as reaching out to business users on their behalf to negotiate a sponsorship/support contract/bounty/etc? The sales part of all of this seems like it's the biggest challenge for OSS projects where it's just a few engineers who don't have the time or skill to do sales.
Fantastic questions & feedback – thank you @bogwog!
1. Yes they can, but they remain anonymous and private only for the maintainer to see and take action on. Currently, we don't have automation for explicit rejection/approval, but something we want to add. Completely agree re: maintainer control – it's a core principle of ours.
2. Not today, but I absolutely love this idea. Added it to the backlog: https://github.com/orgs/polarsource/discussions/855
3. Agree. We have a lot of plans here for the future. Definitely think this is a huge opportunity long-term.
I wish success to initiatives like that.
From the article I didn't understand the model. Or how it is diffirent from existing projects like https://bountysource.com/ and others.
It sounds like bountysource, but bountysource seems to have stopped paying bounties. Found these two links on the Wikipedia Article for Bountysource:
[CRITICAL] Bountysource Escrow, Complain @ dfpi.ca.gov, 18.05.2023 - https://github.com/bountysource/core/issues/1539
What is wrong with your support and cash out process?, 20.06.2021 - https://github.com/bountysource/core/issues/1586
Working on docs for the site. Clear we can do a better job explaining this.
Until then, I answered this thread on the topic the other day which hopefully clarifies: https://github.com/polarsource/polar/discussions/391#discuss...
Great to see more in this space. We've been working on the same problem with https://www.ringerhq.com for the past ~year and have seen great success with specific projects. We're changing our approach slightly to give contributors and maintainers more tools after receiving feedback on specific features. If I can reiterate one piece of advice: listen to the community!
Big fan of what you're building with Ringer. Would love to chat more if you're interested. You can reach me at birk [at] polar.sh
(Old man rant) For fuck's sake.
If I wanted to be a social media influencer, I'd be on Instagram / OnlyFans.
If i wanted to spend my time "an entrepreneur with superpowers to convert the community into backers", I would be running a company / start up doing sales.
I wish to write code.
Some of that code is open source. Some of it I write because someone pays me to do so.
I dont have to do any sales and that is fantastic.
So far nobody has given me money for my open-source code and that is fine.
I write my open-source tools because I admire those who came before me and all they have contributed to the world. It is a civic duty.
They gave us operating systems, compilers, databases, libraries.
When someone creates a new thing and its 90% derived from free tools with a bit of code sauce / UI on top it, call it open source and then run around wanting to get paid for it they are in the wrong pasture.
If you are wanting to make billions of dollars and you create some form of "open source" system but you get angry if someone uses it and does make money from it, you are in the wrong pasture.
Contemplate Linux, (Open)*BSD, GNU tools, Postgres and everything open source you use to make your product and none of which you have paid for. Imagine if Theo had $1 for every OpenBSD install. (I love OpenBSD) Id owe him at least a few hundred dollars. On aggregate he would be at least a millionaire.
For people who do want to inject money into open source that is great. Dont pick me.
Pick projects that are vital in the stack and who are underfunded.
And I salute you for it, truly.
Intent here is not for each commit across all of OSS to be paid for. Or that every maintainer has to charge for add-on services.
Polar is designed for maintainers who either 1) spend an enormous amount of time in effectively unpaid support already or 2) want tooling to run an independent business around their OSS initiatives.
It’s not designed for everyone and you opt-in to use it (as maintainers, contributors or backers).
To me that’s the core trait of OSS: Freedom. Today, I don’t think maintainers have that freedom to easily pursue an independent business or get paid for support towards businesses without an insane amount of unnecessary overhead. That’s what we aim to change for those who seek it.
Won't this just encourage maintainers to sit on issues... just waiting for the bounty to increase? They might even purposefully introduce painful but simple bugs just to push consumers to pay to have them fixed.
Would be cool if bounties could have an expiration date. I’ll pay $100 if issue X is fixed by date Y. Probably more reflective of business value too, since if an issue isn’t fixed relatively quickly I’ll have to build my own workaround.
Polar could certainly be abused that way, but I think it's a theoretical problem more than a realistic one.
Open source operates in a marketplace today (just not an economic one) so market dynamics would flush this out imo. Intentional bugs, stale development etc would lead to user churn and/or forks. I'd argue faster within OSS where users can see how things are handled.
Having said that, I certainly think the risk of it and fraud more in general increases once an economic marketplace is formed. However, I think those problems are then "good" problems to have and easy ones to fix, e.g flagging repositories with unusually high ratio of repeat pledges, velocity of bugs etc.
Another kind of problem would be when someone pledges a big sum for an obscure feature, a first-time contributor writes a (technically perfect) PR for it. Maintainer does not want to merge it, because the feature does not align with maintainer's project goals. But not merging will now look like a dick move, as it denies the PR author the compensation.
With Polar today only the maintainer receives the pledges once an issue/feature is completed. However, we're working on the ability for maintainers to split that with any potential contributors. It's definitely an important feature and part of our model. Just something we decided to scope out from the initial launch – in the interest of launching early and building in public.
An important distinction between Polar vs. traditional bounty services though and regarding your point is:
Everything goes through the maintainer(s) and we're equipping them with the insights, capital and tools to reward their contributors. While bounty services allow anyone to post a bounty and anyone to pursue it. However, ultimately it needs to be reviewed, merged and maintained indefinitely by the maintainer(s). By ensuring it all flows via maintainer(s) it:
1. Rewards maintainers as well – key given their efforts
2.Guarantees maintainers are aligned & behind pledges first. Combined with in control on how to expose, delegate and reward it. Avoiding unnecessary friction, bad faith and overhead if such alignment is first made during PR.
Then the payment can go to a fork. If the maintainer really wants to keep his vision for the project and others are literally voting with their wallets for something else, why would that be a problem?
If they were simple to fix other people would just fix them an make a PR.
If a project became notorious for pulling stuff like that, and rejecting pull requests, people would most likely just make a fork.
I guess that also raises the issue of who gets paid if a third party pull request fixes an issue.
Bad incentive structures are everywhere though, including at corporations where people design "cool" architectures which fail, and then swoop in to save the day.
I'm your target and I don't exactly understand what you're writing.
For example, I want to donate $100 toward Rust Rocket version 1.0.0.
Can Polar help with this goal? If so, what's my next step?
Sorry about that, but happy to clarify anything.
You can pledge behind any open source issue that's on GitHub today. Just simply need to replace github.com in the URL with polar.sh or goto polar.new and drop the link.
We'll then reach out to the maintainers if they're not on the platform. Will soon ship so that an automatic comment is made (once). We don't want to create spam in the issues.
I really wish that had been, say, within the first 3000 words of the homepage. In fact, I think they would make a perfect lead. I literally had to go to the comments, page here to understand what was going on.
Great feedback, I really appreciate it! Will definitely fix
Props for trying, the software world needs something like this.
However, I don't see how this is not fundamentally just a Github feature. They don't have it now, but if Polar gets any traction, they'll implement it pretty swiftly and probably eat your lunch.
Does MS want to incentivize really professional polished open source?
This is such a no-brainer thing for GitHub to do, I've really wondered why they never did it.
It'd also be an obvious thing for Patreon to consider getting into, though it's maybe outside their core expertise.
Thanks toyg! Re: GitHub, I answered another comment on this note here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36736826
We did this in 2010 :). In the years since there has been many similar attempts. This one, however, seems to have all the important things right. Congrats for the funding and good luck!
Thank you! If you are who I think you are we’re already connected, but otherwise I’d love to chat: birk[at]polar.sh
This may sound crazy, but I think the right model for open source funding is charging for updates. Red Hat has actually shown us the way. Developed world Ubuntu/Red Hat/SUSE users should pay $~20/year for access to all releases, $5 of which goes to the distro, $5 which goes to the base system/core utilities, and the rest should fund your particular OSS apps/frameworks/supporting apps running above the base layer.
Yes, obviously donation/sponsorship doesn't work, but I'm not sure pay per issue resolved is the best model either. Good apps shouldn't be punished for having few issues, or needing few features.
People should be able to opt in, but I think opting in at the distro level is the right choice as it would create a broad base of support. Of course, there will be those that don't want to pay, but I think a premium model for power users and enterprise customers makes sense. These premium users could have access to beta/nightly channels, early SRPMS/src debs, and priority or triaged issue/PR resolution?
Are there issues to be resolved? Yes, of course. How to divide payments to apps, and within app communities, but these aren't insurmountable problems. Canonical, etc., could simply set standards and require app communities to explain any variance from those standards.
I have 0 doubt in my mind that it could cost 1 dollar and most people wouldn't pay.
Which is entirely fair for some users who need less, but it would remove the talking point "We support OSS" while doing nothing. If "Google pays $25 million in OSS fees to...", we definitely know they care.
"People won't pay" is absolutely fine for users who simply need a barebones systems and never need a priority ticket re a Postgres issue, or a priority update.
I actually think its fine to create two classes of users -- those that pay a modest amount, and those that pay nothing. Perhaps the lesson is those that pay a modest amount get modestly more service, and those that pay nothing should have no expectations. Perhaps those persons who contribute to OSS or develop karma within OSS would receive a gratis memberships?
The vision for the v1 is spot on. There were some attempts to turn the open source ecosystem into a creator economy - they are so similar but…
The big BUT is that software needs to be maintained whereas a video once uploaded on YouTube doesn‘t need to be edited again.
I have a feeling that Birk and the Polar team have the right insights to build the right tools to serve the specific needs of open-source software maintainers.
Hey, Birk here (founder of Polar). Thank you so much @patrick91 for sharing our post here and thank you @mfts0 for the kind words.
Completely agree. I believe open source – as one of the largest and most important ecosystems in the world – is deserving of having a thriving "creator economy". Combined with it being a win-win for the users (businesses and individuals).
But such a platform needs to be bespoke for open source and its nuances vs. focused on content creation. It can't be a silver bullet solution either. All projects are different. So with Polar, we aim to build out a suite of all the possible value-add offerings, but allow maintainers to experiment, tweak and adapt to make it fit their initiatives and communities.
We have our work cut out for us. It's going to be insanely hard and fixing funding is the holy grail, but it's an important mission to pursue and I'm convinced a creator economy will form since current models are not beneficial to anyone. Just a matter of who & how. That's why I think it's crucial we're building it open source ourselves to truly build in public and serve maintainers through quick iterations and based on their needs, what's working etc. Fun times :-)
Interesting idea, A small but impactful change I would make would be to change dollar amounts into tokens. e.g. 1 token = $50.
A company might want to buy 1000 tokens and allocate tokens individually to specific issues, but they also might want to put tokens in a pot the maintainer can access to "spend" on issues they want to prioritise for the project or allow them to "spend" tokens at a specific rate, etc.
It also means that money is committed upfront by the companies, i.e. the money is real and exists, has been set aside for this thing and in case of a dispute polar can make decisions, etc
Thank you! Excellent feedback and completely aligned with the intent here.
> It also means that money is committed upfront by the companies, i.e. the money is real and exists, has been set aside for this thing and in case of a dispute polar can make decisions, etc
Glad to say, that's how it works already. A pledge is paid upfront and the capital resides within the Polar platform account with Stripe until the issue is marked completed. Then it's transferred to the maintainer minus fees (10%). Or refunded to the backer after 6 months (a timeframe we'll experiment with). We're going to build a "Polar balance" so individuals or companies can top-up their account, automatically disperse it etc too.
So the only question is whether it needs to be abstracted into a "token" concept or can simply continue to be $ upfront. Definitely some advantages and opportunities with "token" vs. money though. Just a bit mindful of the associations people have with "token" specifically from the crypto world.
> they also might want to put tokens in a pot the maintainer can access to "spend" on issues they want to prioritise for the project or allow them to "spend" tokens at a specific rate
Love this! https://github.com/orgs/polarsource/discussions/858
Polar asks you to grant "act on your behalf" permissions to your Github. As someone who has both professional and open source projects at Github, that's a definite deal breaker
Unfortunately, this is the default by GitHub and their OAuth prompt and nothing we can change. See https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/37117
Most of our API integration is purely about synchronising repositories, issues & PRs (read-only). With the exception of 2 things. 1) Inject the Polar badge. We then edit the issue body to append it at the bottom. 2) You can explicitly post a comment as yourself via Polar when you badge an issue, but this is entirely optional and merely a convenience feature would you want to. Requires manual & clear action.
I did come here to post the same reaction. I saw the OAuth prompt with "act on your behalf" and intermediately closed the browser tab. When I want to take a look at something new I do not want ti give it what looks like nearly full access on my account.
Fix an unfixable thing?
Edit: to expand -- these initiatives seem to always be cooked up by people who do not write software, don't fix bugs, don't hire software developers. They never work because adding a feature to a product or fixing a bug isn't a commodity item that you can just buy with a click and spread cost between many parties.
The result is that most of the prospective purchasers end up having an easier path to get what they want, which is to fork and fix themselves (usually via in-house devs already on staff).
Now that the company is funded, are you hiring? I'd love to work for a company that has the sole goal of making FOSS sustainable, I even wrote a bit about it here: https://raphael.lullis.net/open-source-funding/
Really liked the blog and this article too https://raphael.lullis.net/can-foss-eat-the-world/
Lot of overlap :-)
Would be great to connect. Just hired for the open role we had, but we’ll grow more. You can reach me at birk[at]polar.sh
https://ondsel.com/blog/software-bounties-are-a-dumb-idea/
Conclusion:
> Bounties are a lousy foundation for sustainable development of large projects like FreeCAD. They typically represent a gross underestimation of real work required to solve a problem, commonly miss a bigger picture, and encourage worst software development practices.
Growing larger is fun but also really overwhelming. Most ambitious projects that aim to stay afloat will have to experiment with different approaches to getting funded on a regular basis and come up with their own mix of solutions. It’s that or perish.
> will have to experiment with different approaches to getting funded on a regular basis and come up with their own mix of solutions
Couldn't agree more. Sponsoring issues/features is our 1st offering with Polar, but our goal with v1.0 is to have a suite of add-on services that maintainers can sell on-demand or as part of a subscription.
We started with issues/features since they're universal to all open source initiatives and where demand is first represented & communicated most often today. Lots of challenges to solve there too be sure, but solvable.
I will on occasion email an OSS maintainer offering to pay for some improvement or consulting. But I don't do this often because of the friction. In other I can't even find their email, but then it feels awkward to publicly post this in a GH issue.
Completely agree. I've run into this many times too and having talked with a lot of companies, I know the same is true for a lot of them. As Polar removes the friction here, it will hopefully accelerate our ability to sponsor such efforts
I think I prefer StackAid, it funds the entire chain of dependencies and doesn't lock anything down: https://www.stackaid.us/
Huge fan of StackAid! Glad you're using it! Just to clarify and out of curiosity, what do you mean with "doesn't lock anything down" in the context of StackAid vs. Polar?
It doesn’t paywall anything, you can’t say that only people who support you on StackAid gets A or B.
(One idea I think we toyed with at Flattr, which was also a flat fee donation system, was to potentially enable people to lock something down on whether you donated to anything at all, but ultimately decided that the internet was meant to be opened and thus we added mechanisms to Flattr to make it really hard to abuse it as a paywall, which eg Germans loved but most Americans was really confused by )
What's different from the other crowdsourcing platforms for open source?
I answered this thread on the topic the other day which hopefully clarifies: https://github.com/orgs/polarsource/discussions/391#discussi...
Nice idea and good luck :)
>Join our Discord to discuss ideas, early design proposals and upcoming features
Yeah, no...disheartening to see this many FOSS developers opting for Discord for realtime chat.
Why disheartening? What would you prefer?
It's a walled garden that was hostile to third-party clients from the start. It asks for phone number to sign up. The client is slow (both web version and electron version). Ghost notifications and spams in DM. No way to find channels to join.
Matrix, IRC...at least set up a bridge to one if you are going Discord
Why would I use this instead of the usual ways (GitHub Sponsors, PayPal, Patreon, OpenCollective)?
From what I understand, Github Sponsors is not granular: you either subscribe to a project or you don't. Polar seems to allow for issue-specific funding and other more granular bits.
I was very confused, I thought this was about the polars, data science/data analytics toolkit. I know names are hard, but maybe pick something more distinct.
> our $1.8M pre-seed round to help us pursue our mission of expanding the open source economy
$1.8M VC funding for what?
Best case: Maintainers paid, GitHub acquires Polar.
Worst case: Maintainers paid, GitHub copies Polar.
Here's my thinking re: GitHub on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36736826
No doubt Polar can be a better product overall and focus on things that GitHub would never do. GitHub has a major distribution advantage though. Could see them adding something basic into GitHub Sponsors along with first-party UI that shows up on all issues.
Curious what you think about subscriptions versus one-time payments. Seems like Polar is going more for the latter. Would love if this was normalized and could see it leading to more money coming in overall. My concern is that subscriptions are great for predictability (company sponsors $500/mo) and without that I need to find a way to re-acquire money to pay rent every month.
> No doubt Polar can be a better product overall and focus on things that GitHub would never do. GitHub has a major distribution advantage though. Could see them adding something basic into GitHub Sponsors along with first-party UI that shows up on all issues.
Absolutely, I'm not saying it's not a risk. Ultimately, my stance and belief is that OSS is obviously a massive ecosystem deserving of an independent COSS pathway to support careers and small businesses to emerge from it. Creating such a long-tail economy is going to require so many different things and more will emerge once it's successful. That's how it should be. So I'm convinced there is room for many actors within this domain. Just like how Open Collective is doing a phenomenal job and solving real & hard problems within the donation & sponsorship domain even with GitHub Sponsors (often in partnership with OC).
So going back to my stance on what I think GitHub's strategy should be: Instead of expanding GitHub Sponsors themselves, I think it should become the payments layer within OSS. Offered through an API that their apps & partners can integrate with with GitHub getting revshare. Avoiding spreading themselves thin by chasing all these opportunities themselves and instead empowering more of them through a GitHub Payments API.
> Curious what you think about subscriptions versus one-time payments. Seems like Polar is going more for the latter. Would love if this was normalized and could see it leading to more money coming in overall. My concern is that subscriptions are great for predictability (company sponsors $500/mo) and without that I need to find a way to re-acquire money to pay rent every month.
Completely agree. We're going to do both. Started with one-time payments now in early alpha, but expanding into subscription is a core part of our long-term vision for all of the reasons you mentioned and more.
>Premium access. Educational material
Arguably, putting a restrictive licence on manuals makes something not free software https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.html
Flawless execution