A handy guide to financial support for open source
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Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderI have a couple of browser extensions, one of them acquired 15k new users in the past two weeks and it is still trending on Firefox Add-ons, yet donation links are rarely clicked, and I haven't received any contributions. The effectiveness of asking for donations can vary a lot, and in my experience it is not sustainable at all, unless your project is wildly popular, or it supports the needs of an affluent and passionate user base.
I want to submit a PR to remove Caddy from the "open core" category... or at least add it to several other categories which helped make it possible for me to work on Caddy full-time. Open Core did not work for us (hence the link to the retrospective). At first it was a donation button, then an award from Mozilla (MOSS) -- kind of like a grant but they emphasized it was not technically a grant, probably for legal reasons…
Dual licensing is missing?
Really glad to see this, but I think we really need to assess how much money is available from each of these channels. My experience with some of these channels (e.g. bounties) is that the effective hourly wage is radically lower than offered by any industry position.
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 381
- Total comments
- 131
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016-06-16 | A handy guide to making money in open source | chippy | 6 | 1 |
| 2016-06-17 | Guide to making money in open source | gotchange | 49 | 2 |
| 2017-09-29 | Lemonade Stand: A guide to financial support for open source | aleyan | 2 | 0 |
| 2017-11-26 | A handy guide to financial support for open source | sidcool | 1 | 0 |
| 2017-11-27 | A handy guide to financial support for open sourceFirst breakout · Best thread | craigkerstiens | 175 | 51 |
| 2020-01-25 | A handy guide to financial support for open source | colinprince | 2 | 0 |
| 2022-08-29 | A handy guide to financial support for open sourceLatest 20+ point return | SenHeng | 146 | 77 |