I got infected in a hospital while already suffering from an autoimmune flare. I was isolated for a week, hazmat suits, the works. Lost 15lbs in the hospital and had to take antibiotics for 3 months to make sure any resistant spores were killed. I’ve heard that fecal transplants have a very high success rate in curing Cdiff but didn’t have that option at the time.
Yes, we do hold payments for projects and pay them out monthly. However if you don't want to claim your funds on StackAid but do accept donations elsewhere, we will use those service to pay you out instead. Running the tool offline would be challenging because we a large index of dependency->repository mappings across various ecosystems so we can resolve your dependency tree. You would also still be stuck manually paying out to possibly hundreds of projects. FWIW we are completely transparent about the payments we make to each project as well as how much goes to us.
Sure, but you (maybe not you specifically) _solve problems_ by using a lot of open source. Your ability to do your job and get paid depends on the labor of others. Why not compensate them for it.
I see a lot comments here suggesting the he should just pack his bags and get a corporate gig. How many other great open source projects will we miss out on because developers see this advice and not even bother in the first place.
At this risk of some self promotion, we developed StackAid (https://stackaid.us) to help fund the long tail of open source because of the exact problems you mentioned. People only tend to remember the popular/direct dependencies.
Obviously I’m biased because I have skin in the game but articles like this really do a disservice for getting maintainers paid, something the author purports to support, because it gives people yet another excuse not to fund maintainers and maintain the status quo. I have yet to see illustrative examples in posts like these that show well funded projects doing worse because they got money.
That is effectively what happens. Unclaimed funds are reallocated after a few months to projects that have been claimed. Like you said, that's a good incentive to sign up sooner rather than later.
To answer your first question, you give StackAid access to repositories that you own (private or public) and we discover the dependencies you use automatically. Those dependencies are what is funded by your monthly subscription. Let's say you give us access to 4 different repositories with a total of 50 dependencies, then your subscription is divided equally among them. Hope that's helpful.
Hey, we are located in the US based in Seattle and San Francisco and incorporated as an LLC. Our other founder has more of a social media[1] presence if that's helpful.
We use Stripe to process credit card payments as well as to pay out funds to projects that claim their funds. US based recipients who receive above a certain amount of money will be required to give the required information for 1099 income.
There is no Stackaid dependency to install. We are treated as an implicit direct dependency for the purpose of calculating the fee we collect. If you have 19 direct dependencies, StackAid will be the 20th, and get 5% of your total subscription.
Anyone with admin access to a repository can register to be paid by StackAid and the total allocation for a project will be split amongst them equally. We plan to allow adjusting the percentages each maintainer receives in the near future.
StackAid founder here. There are a couple of questions that keep coming up that I thought I would address in one place.
- People don't want to give money to Stripe, Meta, etc since their projects are already well funded by corporations. We agree! Right now, those projects can just not claim their funds which would then be reallocated, or they can pass their funds on to their dependencies instead. We are exploring other ways to allow you to exempt certain organizations/repositories from being funded.
- People will try and game the system. They can try but they largely will not succeed because ultimately many developers will still need to be convinced to use and depend on their projects. How funds are allocated and what dependencies an open source project has is public knowledge and the community will rightly punish bad actors.
We thought long and hard about how people could game the system but ultimately it will be quite difficult because you still have to convince a large number of developers to actually use and depend on your project. And since the flow of donations and dependencies is public, the community will not look kindly one individuals trying such tactics.
Appreciate the feedback. In case you didn't see it already, we take a different approach to getting paid[1] that we think is more equitable.
You can also use our GitHub action to publish a stackaid.json file with your dependencies to a new repo just for the purpose of giving us access. This was your repos/source say private to us, but your dependencies can still be funded. It's a bit more effort on your part but hopefully addresses the concern.