Sponsorhello — open-source funding for dummies
Supporting open source has never been this easy, what are you waiting for?
Hello everyone, my name is Mauro and I work as a frontend developer in VLK Studio. Today I’ll like to talk about how we support open source projects in VLK, and how this approach can be used by everyone through Sponsorhello.
Brief introduction
In this article, with “supporting open source projects”, I mean financially. For some people, this may sound weird because is like paying for something free, but this is not the point, I’d like you to embrace another perspective.
Another perspective
If you are a developer or a manager in your company, I’d like to make you think about 1 simple thing: How many open source libraries you’re using right now? You probably don’t know, but I can tell you for sure you’re using tons of them, probably 60, 70, or even 80% of your codebase works thanks to them.
If you think about this, a lot of what you’re earning right now as a developer or as a company is because someone chooses not to keep for him/herself knowledge, but instead share it with everyone:
- Are you using git to version your code? Thanks, Linus Torvalds;
- Is your backend written in nodejs? Thanks, Ryan Dahl;
- Are you using Redux to manage the state of your application? Guess what… thanks to Dan Abramov, Tim Dorr, and Mark Erikson;
- Are you using Redis? Say thanks to Salvatore Sanfilippo.
And I can continue with an infinite list of commonly used frameworks, languages, and libraries that are completely open-source.
Let’s be honest, most of us have a job because of these folks, it’s time to give something back.
Don’t just take, give
In VLK we decided to sponsor open source projects by following a simple process:
- 💰 Define a budget, it’s not important how much, let’s say 100 dollars per month but could be 1000$, 50$ or 20$;
- 👆 Select 20 open source projects you’re using every day;
- 📆 Subscribe for a monthly donation of
your budget / 20to each project.
That’s it, simple right?
We think that everyone can do it too, no matter the budget you have or the number of projects you want to sponsor, if everyone is giving back something the whole ecosystem will grow: projects will have more support, and maintainers will finally have a concrete financial help for their incredible work.
We wanted to make it even more simple, for us of course, but also for everyone that wants to embrace this vision, this is how Sponsorhello is born!
SponsorHello, world!
If you’re asking “How can I know which projects I’m using are searching for funding?” the answer it’s Sponsorhello!
To use it you just have to go to Sponsorhello.org, and follow these simple steps:
- 💾 Upload your package.json
- ⛏ Pick the projects you want to support
- 🎁 Donate, and enjoy the open-source community
How it works
We extract the dependencies you’re using from your package.json and then, through GitHub, we tell you which of those are searching for funding and show you all the links to directly fund the projects you’re using!
Do you want to understand exactly how Sponsorhello works? It’s pretty easy, here you can find a more detailed explanation.
Currently, Sponsorhello support only the package.json as a source of information, but soon other languages and platforms will be supported, and of course Sponsorhello it’s an open-source project, so feel free to file a Pull Request and help us to increase the support!
Conclusion
As I said before, open-source it’s all around us, we give it for granted, but it’s not.
Behind the projects we are using, there are real people, working every day to make sure that our products work well and our customers are happy.
It’s our duty to support these people, and be part of the growth of these projects because if they’ll grow, we will grow as well with them.
Thank you for reading.
