Cofounded Host Collective (DiscountASP.net). Cofounded Player Axis (Social Gaming). Computer Scientist and Technology Evangelist with 20+ years of experience with JavaScript!
When I was creating mobile games, the biggest hurdle we had was getting a user to cross that barrier of free to one cent. Once they were a pay user, it was much much easier to convince them to pay more. But to convince them to open their wallet even for a penny was next to impossible.
I see a similar mentality with mobile apps. $1.99 for a mobile app? It better be the best god damn app of my life. Of course I'll just throw out a few bucks to someone on the street with their hand out without even thinking about it.
When I was younger I would drop TONS of dollars in an arcade. And now that I can buy a game for $1.99 I balk. And when you buy it, you buy it once and can put 100's of hours into it. You can't do that with an arcade. But still... wish it was just $0.99.
It's the same with open source. We're not used to "buying" open source. There are too many barriers to move from a $0.00 user to a $0.01 user. None of our peers are doing it. I have 1000's of node_modules in my folder, which ones should I contribute to? How do I convince my boss? That's not gonna happen.
There are too many projects and I would have to contribute to each one individually. Each using their own preferred method of payment.
Those barriers are far too great. But that doesn't mean they cannot be solved.
I see an opportunity for something like the Basic Attention Token in the Brave Browser. Something that you could contribute a monthly allowance into and could automatically distribute funds to content creators you use the most.
I see an opportunity for an Open Source fund that people contribute to. This fund could then distribute money to worthy open source projects.
The problem is real, but shifting peoples mentality on a mass scale is a near impossible task.
Auto distribution of a monthly donation would be a great feature for Back Your Stack. Let me donate $10/Mo and have it evenly split between all the projects my code depends on, whether it's 5 or 500. Making that first step easy would help a lot of people to get started donating.
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This is a hard problem to solve.
When I was creating mobile games, the biggest hurdle we had was getting a user to cross that barrier of free to one cent. Once they were a pay user, it was much much easier to convince them to pay more. But to convince them to open their wallet even for a penny was next to impossible.
I see a similar mentality with mobile apps. $1.99 for a mobile app? It better be the best god damn app of my life. Of course I'll just throw out a few bucks to someone on the street with their hand out without even thinking about it.
When I was younger I would drop TONS of dollars in an arcade. And now that I can buy a game for $1.99 I balk. And when you buy it, you buy it once and can put 100's of hours into it. You can't do that with an arcade. But still... wish it was just $0.99.
It's the same with open source. We're not used to "buying" open source. There are too many barriers to move from a $0.00 user to a $0.01 user. None of our peers are doing it. I have 1000's of node_modules in my folder, which ones should I contribute to? How do I convince my boss? That's not gonna happen.
There are too many projects and I would have to contribute to each one individually. Each using their own preferred method of payment.
Those barriers are far too great. But that doesn't mean they cannot be solved.
I see an opportunity for something like the Basic Attention Token in the Brave Browser. Something that you could contribute a monthly allowance into and could automatically distribute funds to content creators you use the most.
I see an opportunity for an Open Source fund that people contribute to. This fund could then distribute money to worthy open source projects.
The problem is real, but shifting peoples mentality on a mass scale is a near impossible task.
Auto distribution of a monthly donation would be a great feature for Back Your Stack. Let me donate $10/Mo and have it evenly split between all the projects my code depends on, whether it's 5 or 500. Making that first step easy would help a lot of people to get started donating.