So proud to have SerenityOS & Ladybird onboard Polar. You're such an inspiration and the community is incredible with talented & kind developers uniting to build something many deem impossible to begin with. Thanks for showing that those are the ambitions we should pursue.
Thank you! Yes, we've shipped most of the features mentioned as aspirations in that original post now. We'll soon share an updated one on the big goals for 2024 :)
Agree. I love our issue funding feature (now with contributor rewards too), but it was always part of a larger suite of funding tools we wanted to offer & now can. Getting recurring funding/income (subscriptions) is definitely crucial.
Yes, completely agree re: merchant of record. I've chatted with hundreds of open source maintainers and this has been a big pain point & concern for many. So we wanted to address it. As a platform, we can work with tax professionals & lawyers to help solve this once vs. N times for each maintainer standalone (an impossible burden).
Thank you! Important callout: We designed issue funding for maintainers & contributors vs. bounty hunters. We don't believe in traditional bounties. More on this here: https://polar.sh/polarsource/posts/introducing-rewards
Will expand as we can with Stripe. Long-term, in order to expand truly world-wide, I think we'll need to integrate support for other payment providers too. Definitely something we want. Just a question of short-term capabilities & main priority being to reach a v1 that truly makes a dent in open source funding. Expanding markets, platforms and more once we have.
Yes, supporting more platforms is definitely something I see as part of our mission and long-term development. Started with GitHub since it's where most open source initiatives are hosted + analysis on large registries, e.g npm, pypi, confirmed that almost all of them where.
We're big fans of other platforms and looking forward to expand our support. But main focus now is helping open source developers on GitHub get meaningfully more funding & helping more than a few work on it full-time to even start small businesses. Once we've achieved that & proved our product can make a big difference, it's time to expand.
Birk from Polar here. We're building a platform for open source developers offering better funding & community tools. We're building it open source too: https://github.com/polarsource/polar
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.