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Ask HN: Who's an open source maintainer/project that needs sponsorship or help?

46 points by armini ↗ HN
Following an earlier post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34780859 & suggestion from hiccuphippo, we should take the time to recognise & reward the open source community we depend on.

It would be great if the HN community could nominate maintainers or projects they know who's super helpful & impactful. We hope that by creating awareness about the issue we can also help increase the funds going to that maintainers.

33 comments

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pabs3
Basically all of open source needs contributors and sponsorship. If you work for a company, get them to allocate some funding and employee hours towards the projects they use, including deep dependencies. The FOSSjobs resources wiki has a Patronage section that could be useful for the funding part.

https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

armini
Thanks for sharing the link @pabs3 more people need to know of all the solutions out there
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gavinhoward
I am not an Open Source developer that needs funding.

I just created a business, an LLC, to develop my software. I did this on purpose so that companies would have an entity to send money to if they use my software.

I've heard that developers and managers at companies do want to give money to FOSS projects, but sending money to an individual is fraught with peril. Sending money to another company that can generate invoices and give some services? Much easier to justify.

If possible, I suggest developers of popular FOSS projects do this. If you include my search for a good bank, I've spent probably 20 hours doing this. (I used lawyers as well, but that's not required.) Spending 20 hours to have some way to receive money may be worth it.

Protostome
I support this claim. However, you have to take into account that a company carries some liability which not all FOSS developer want to have.

I personally, have a few open source projects that were born out of my personal need. On one hand, I'm happy to share it for free and don't expect any payment, since I would have developed those tools anyway. Sharing it is only my way to give back to the community, and it carries very small effort on my behalf.

On the other hand, if you make money from a software that uses my tool, it would be kind of you to share your success somehow (sponsoring a product is just one way. Another is contributing code, for example)

gavinhoward
Yes, this is also something developers should consider when making the decision.
pabs3
Have you had much success with this model? Is your income no-strings-attached, do you provide support or just maintain the software? How do you find companies that just want to give you free money?
gavinhoward
I just started the company, so I can't answer those questions unfortunately.

I'm timing the start of my business activities with the bottom of the economy so that bad companies will be gone and existing companies will be opening their wallets again.

If it would be wanted, I'll do a Q&A on HN if I succeed.

Edit: When I do get income, it won't be no-strings-attached; I will be providing services. However, my contract has an explicit provision that I retain full control of the software.

Some services I will provide include:

* Responding to bug reports. (I will straight up ignore and delete bug reports from non-customers.)

* Limited liability.

* Integrating my software into a customer's software.

* Answering questions about my software to customer employees.

If a customer asks for a different service, I'll probably consider that too.

barefeg
> I will straight up ignore and delete bug reports from non-customers.

Wouldn’t it be more helpful to leave the reports but not work on them actively? It might be that a paying customer finds the same bug anyway.

gavinhoward
I meant that I would delete them from public view. I would investigate them for sure.
pabs3
Definitely do a HN Q&A once you are ready.
kwk1
The FreeCAD Project Association (FPA.) https://fpa.freecad.org/
armini
This is definitely something that could have huge impact & needs more love. Are you associated with the team or the project @kwk1?
kwk1
Yes, I'm "kkremitzki", one of the founding FPA members and a FreeCAD administrator/dev.
jasfi
Nexus: https://github.com/jfilby/nexus

This is a web framework + ORM for Nim. It's in desperate need of more work to support DBs other than PostgreSQL and make the ORM more flexible. The web side also needs more work.

armini
It’s great to see there has been regular updates on this & thanks for bringing it to our attention.
gattacamovie
FBReader (aka FbreaderJ) is a very popular ebook Reader on android 10M+ downloads (and many other platforms). Unfortunately a few years back the owners of https://github.com/geometer/FBReaderJ (1.8k stars) decided to stop open source contributions and go only commercial. Their last open source version has been put here: https://github.com/geometer/FBReader-Android-2 (gradle based) As android SDK evolved, the app is no longer compatible with newer versions. The only fork that I know it made some updates for slightly newer sdk few years back: https://github.com/gelojavonitalla/FBReader-Android-2 and https://github.com/aplicatii-romanesti/FBReader-Android-2 Of course, besides updating sdk there is also a list of bugs which are long due (I can provide a list).

As the project was open till now, there were other open apps based on it, and currently unable to maintain both the main project and their own ones.

devstein
I maintain several open source projects, most notably:

Sparkmagic (https://github.com/jupyter-incubator/sparkmagic)

Sparkmagic provides jupyter magics and kernels for working with remote Spark clusters. It's used by thousands of developers and companies like Pinterest, Amazon, more!

I've been maintaining for the past few years and would love help!

KSOPS (https://github.com/viaduct-ai/kustomize-sops)

KSOPS, or kustomize-SOPS, is a kustomize KRM exec plugin for SOPS encrypted resources. KSOPS can be used to decrypt any Kubernetes resource, but is most commonly used to decrypt encrypted Kubernetes Secrets and ConfigMaps. As a kustomize plugin, KSOPS allows you to manage, build, and apply encrypted manifests the same way you manage the rest of your Kubernetes manifests.

KSOPS is the most popular kustomize plugin and I'd love help maintaining and improving it from out GitOps fanatics.

armini
Hi @devstein, thank you for your contribution. I couldn't find your details online for a DM. Are you able to book a time for us to chat https://calendly.com/thanks_dev/30min I'd love to see how we can help.