From 5c086bc52fa3a226bcf706b1f420a5d98ea377dd Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Patrick Spek <p.spek@tyil.nl>
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2021 10:45:58 +0100
Subject: Redo most of the blog in Hugo

Missing posts will have to be added later
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----
-title: Funding Yourself As A Free Software Developer
-date: 2017-12-21 05:29:26
-tags: FreeSoftware Programming Funding
-description: >
-  An overview of multiple funding platforms, with pros and cons, from the
-  perspective of a free software developer. It's intent is to help others find
-  a possible form of income while doing what they love, and what I consider is
-  immensely important for society.
----
-= Funding Yourself As A Free Software Developer
-:toc: preamble
-
-I've been meaning to spend more time on developing free software, helping out
-new users on IRC and writing more tutorials to get others started. All of these
-cost time, and time is money - so I've set out to set up donation accounts.
-In the hopes of helping other developers who struggle to fund their work, I've
-written up this article to talk about my experience.  This is a living
-document! As you explore this yourself, please send me your thoughts on each
-platform and turn me on to interesting platforms I missed.
-
-I'll be focussing on platforms allowing for recurring donations, as these are
-more useful for procuring a stable income.
-
-== Platforms
-=== BountySource
-[WARNING]
-====
-- Requires 3rd-party link:/articles/on-cloudflare/[Cloudflare]-hosted
-  JavaScript sources to function.
-====
-
-BountySource lets people donate money towards an issue on Github your projects.
-Once an issue gets fixed, you can claim the "bounty" that was on this issue.
-This can also help in making clear which issue you should aim for next, and
-can increase interest in contributors for your project.
-
-There's also BountySource Salt, which is a recurring donation platform.
-Projects or teams can use this to gain monthly income to sustain the
-development of their project(s).
-
-Support for this platform is offered through the IRC channel
-https://kiwiirc.com/client/chat.freenode.net:+6697/#bountysource[`#bountysource`
-on Freenode].
-
-The BountySource platform itself is also free software, and the source code
-for it can be found https://github.com/bountysource/core[on github].
-
-You can find BountySource at https://www.bountysource.com/.
-
-=== LiberaPay
-This service seems to be completely free as in freedom. They even
-https://github.com/liberapay/liberapay.com[publish their source on GitHub].
-Their own funding comes through donations on their own platform, instead of
-taking a cut of each donation like most other services.
-
-It's possible to connect other accounts to your LiberaPay account. While this
-feature in general is pretty common, they allow you to link to sites which are
-interesting to show as developer, such as GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket. They
-also let you link to a Mastodon account, if you have one.
-
-To let people know you're accepting donations through LiberaPay, you can use
-one of the widgets they make available for you. This will show a donate button
-which will link to you profile. Do note, this is not a regular HTML button or
-cleverly implemented anchor tag, but a JavaScript-based button.
-
-Another thing LiberaPay lacks is a rewards system. Most other platforms allow
-you to set reward tiers, which allow you to give certain benefits to donors.
-
-You can find Liberapay at https://liberapay.com/.
-
-=== MakerSupport
-[WARNING]
-====
-- The site requires a 3rd-party hosted jQuery.
-- You have to solve a Google reCaptcha in order to register a new account.
-====
-
-MakerSupport seems to be another option, aimed at content creators who might
-need freedom of speech more than others. It seems to be less focused on
-software development, as you cannot link to any of the major git hosting
-platforms.
-
-There are options here to set up "tiers" for your donors; which is a convenient
-way to provide them with perks for their support. For a free software
-developer, this might be something like access to more direct support from the
-developer.
-
-Sadly, registration wasn't as smooth as most other platforms. My preferred
-username, "tyil" is too short. There's no indication of the requirements of any
-of the fields, you just get a popup on submission of the form saying a field is
-wrong.
-
-Additionally, the registration form requires some 3rd-party JavaScript to work,
-and a Google reCaptcha to be solved in order to get the submit button to show
-up. As I have set up uMatrix in my browser, this cost me some extra time to
-finish registration.
-
-Setting a profile image proved to be a little harder. First off, I'm still
-using uMatrix so I had to allow a 3rd-party (Amazon, in this case) XHR
-requests. Secondly, their error when uploading a "wrong" format is also not
-very user friendly, as it won't give you any details on why it's disallowed,
-nor what images are allowed instead.
-
-[NOTE]
-====
-It seems they check the extension of the uploaded image's filename. As far as I
-can tell, you're allowed to upload files that end with `.jpg` and `.png`.
-====
-
-You can find MakerSupport at https://www.makersupport.com/.
-
-=== Patreon
-[WARNING]
-====
-- Requires 3rd-party link:/articles/on-cloudflare[Cloudflare]-hosted
-  JavaScript sources to function.
-- You have to solve a Google reCaptcha in order to register a new account.
-====
-
-Patreon is possibly the most famous donation-based funding platform available
-right now. Its popularity is a good thing, since this means there's probably
-many donors already using this platform.
-
-At Patreon, you can set up so-called goals. Goals are the thing I haven't found
-with other funding platforms. It allows you to set a goal for an amount of
-money, and add a reward to this. This way, you can inform your donors you will
-be creating a certain kind of content once a one-time goal has been reached.
-Basically, you can show your donors what you're going to do with the money
-they're donating to you.
-
-Another interesting thing that I haven't seen on other platforms is the option
-to charge donors per creation, instead of per month. While this may seem less
-fitting for software developers (unless you want to get paid per commit, I
-guess), it's an interesting feature that's pretty unique. If you publish many
-tutorials, guides or other posts, this might fit you very well.
-
-You can link your account to other services, similarly to other platforms, but
-it seems to only allow you to be linked with proprietary social media
-platforms.
-
-You can find Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/home.
-
-=== (Dis)honorable mentions
-==== Hatreon
-I've included this because I found people talking about it on IRC. However, it
-seems to be nothing more than a joke that's gone too far. Its main reason for
-existing seems to be to get away from the political correctness found with
-earlier crowdfunding platforms, yet their site is invite-only, so those who are
-actually interested can't even use it. It seems that pledging is currently
-disabled as well, and has been for at least 10 days.
-
-== But that's not all
-Just setting up an account on a funding platform isn't enough. There's more to
-keeping a healthy and happy supporter base.
-
-=== Spread awareness of your work
-Whether you're writing articles or publishing new releases of projects, tell
-the world you're doing whatever it is you're doing. If nobody knows about your
-project, they won't be able to give any kind of appreciation for it. Use social
-media outlets, public forums, mailing lists, anything! Tell them what you made,
-why it's useful and how they could use it to improve their digital life.
-
-[WARNING]
-====
-Ofcourse, don't spam it to unrelated communication channels. This will only
-backfire.
-====
-
-=== Using the rewards system
-On the platforms that support a rewards system, make use of it. There's some
-little things you can do that go a long way with your supporters. For instance,
-you can offer things like stickers to donors that donate a certain amount of
-money to you. These are reasonably cheap to produce and ship, and many people
-like these.
-
-Another idea that seems to strike well with donors is having a way to talk with
-the person they're supporting directly. This can be done by giving them access
-to an IRC channel for you and your donors. You can use another platform for
-this, but most free software enthousiasts are already on IRC, and there's few
-real-time communication alternatives that they're already using.
-
-=== Don't stick to a single platform
-There's multiple platforms out there, use them! Not all of them have the same
-userbase, and you can reach more people by giving them more options to work
-with.
-
-=== Let people know you're accepting donations
-If people don't know you're even accepting donations, chances are pretty high
-you won't get any. Or if it's too hard to figure out how to donate to you,
-people will simply not take the effort. Make sure people can easily find out
-that you're accepting donations, and how to donate to you.
-
-=== Show what you're doing with donation money
-Have a page with information about what you're using with the money. This can
-be as simple as just saying you pay the rent and buy food with it. Most donors
-don't mind too much what you're doing with the money they donate to you, but a
-few do appreciate having this information available to them.
-
-It can be as simple as adding a `/donate` link to your site where you explain
-how to donate to you, and what you do with the donation money.
-
-[WARNING]
-====
-Don't let it turn into an annoying advertisement though, this will surely have
-an opposite effect.
-====
-
-== Further reading
-There's more places to go for tips and tricks in getting funds to sustain your
-free software development work. I've listed a couple of these here for those
-interested.
-
-- https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfunding[snowdrift.coop wiki on crowdfunding/fundraising services]
-- https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand[A handy guide to financial support for open source]
-
-== RFC
-I'd love to receive feedback on this, as I think being able to get donations
-easily for the work free software developers put in to their projects is
-important.
-
-Getting to know more platforms and giving them a small write-up should help out
-other developers like me looking for the best platform for their use case. I'd
-also like to hear from developers already using a platform, to extend this
-article with more useful information on how to successfully get donors for
-their work.
-
-If you want to contact me, do take a look at the link:/[Contact] section, and
-let me know about your experiences with funding.
-
-And if you liked this post, consider link:/support/[donating] ;)
-- 
cgit v1.1

