I’ve been considering accepting sponsorship again for my projects.
I consider sponsorship for Open Source projects to be a very good thing, even if the total income is something between a coffee and a Netflix subscription. That small monetary donation can motivate many devs to keep working on their project and the tech community benefits.
For popular projects, sponsorship can even rise to the level where devs can go full-time. Without that, critical code can go unloved because the demands of earning a living leave little left to work for free.
So sponsorship is a win-win, and I hope it continues.
Recently I was contacted by a company offering “sponsorship”, and I figured why not hear them out.
They gave three options: a fixed monthly rate, pay per click, or a hybrid of both, in return a big logo and link at the top of the README. This is a quite a different model to sponsorship. It’s no longer “you’ve done great work, and we want to help you continue to do that”, now it is advertising, plain and simple.
Does this matter? The dev gets paid, either way. Well, I feel a little icky about it, and its not just because I can see a future where above the fold in every README is chock-a-block full of ads. Open Source devs getting into the advertising business could change motivations. Where there is money involved you are always going to get perverse incentives. If devs are focused on driving traffic to their README, they aren’t thinking so much about building robust software that benefits the community.
I declined, but there are a number of projects which did take that particular company up on the offer and are now ad-supported. Honestly, I can’t blame them. Those devs have projects used by many, and deserved to be compensated.
For now, I’m not going to run ads on my projects. At least while I have the luxury of being able to turn them down.