You can sponsor Mike right on GH!

https://github.com/sponsors/mholt

*Matt btw

Oh wow. I just wrote a test that needed to parse CSV, and PapaParse was the perfect library for it.

Sponsoring right away.

Just saw that come in. Thank you!

Yeah, I donate from time to time to various projects. But voluntary contributions will never solve this issue.

I had in mind somehow requiring or rewarding everyone to pay a small amount. Like, anyone who uses software from a platform such as GitHub should pay a subscription fee for maintenance depending on usage. It could be small so that it doesn’t interfere with usage. Considering huge number of users, that could pay for maintainers.

We already have that, it's called paid/proprietary software

That’s mostly different.

The point is, there are large number of users, if each user pays a small amount to the platform, they won’t notice it, yet it accumulates to a maintenance fee.

Paying a maintenance fee makes sense, regardless of how you label it. The entirely free software has problems and may not be sustainable.

That is not at all what they said. Your interpretation seems disingenuous.

Maybe it's time to try Flattr again?

(And this time with a solid option for companies too!)

As a core contributor, Matt has expressed on many occasions he would like to be able to pay us for all the time we've spent on the project, but I've always told him we're doing it as volunteers and not for money (my day job pays me sufficiently) and I think he needs it more since he doesn't have other sources of income. And if he did get enough from sponsorships to pay a second salary, I think he should hire someone not already a volunteer to broaden the skillset of the team. One of our biggest problems at this stage is that the members of the core team don't have expertise in a few specific areas that Caddy is lacking in (e.g. metrics/prometheus stuff)

My comment was not an attack on Matt, but against the idea of forcing[1] users to pay for (/donate to) in order to use libre software. Organic donations and sponsorships are great!

1. This may have been a misread on my part, on second read, gp's comment says nothing about mandatory payment. The reason I'm wary of mandatory payments is that you'd have to quantify who deserves what, and expend more time on the administration - likey setting up a foundation or company, or which not every F/OSS project needs. Again, I'm speaking generally - a Caddy Foundation, or Caddy Inc. may be appropriate. "Open source project" is a very broad term, ranging in size from leftpad to the Linux kernel, and the needs will be different for each.

Matt has been generous and rewarded me a few times for my efforts on the project. But just as Francis said, we are willing volunteers.