Can an OpenSource project evolve and be profitable?

    For quite some time now I have been wondering: “Can an Open Source project live and develop in our harsh realities?” This question worries me periodically, since I myself am the author of one such project - WysiBB. I asked a similar question on various resources, there were questions on the Toaster. But in essence it all came down to the fact that the buttons “Support the project”, “Donate”, etc. do not work in the Russian-language segment of the Internet. and only projects with a huge audience and / or paid features can develop.

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    What is the point?

    But finally, one fine day, I came across an interesting idea how to get some financial investments into development and see which features are most demanded by users. I saw this idea on the Robomongo website (who does not know, this is the GUI for MongoDB). And its essence is as follows: the user is given the opportunity to select the most disturbing from the list of issues (from the jithub) and donate funds for its completion. When a user makes a donation, the priority rating of this feature increases. So the author of the project receives funds for his wallet and sees which features have the highest priority (most donations) and, accordingly, are the most popular. The author starts their development in the first place, the project is developing, and the user receives a long-awaited feature. I liked this idea and I decided to implement a similar mechanism on my project, and when I started working on this service, I realized that such a service can be useful not only for me. So was bornGitFund .

    Outlines and simple layouts of the site were quickly made, the basic functionality was developed, and now the beta version is already available for all projects hosted on GitHub.

    Registering a project consists of two simple steps:
    1) Logging in via GitHub
    2) Selecting a project from the list of available ones and filling out wallet data to receive funds.

    After registering on the GitFund website, a project page is created to collect donations and prioritize. The author of the project can post a link to this page and direct users to it.

    How it works?

    Getting to the project page, the user is presented with approximately the following picture. You can see it live here. The
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    user selects which feature he would like to see implemented first and selects it.
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    After that, the user enters the amount that he would like to donate to the selected feature and clicks the Donate button. After that, the feature rises in the ranking and gets a higher priority than others.

    With this mechanism, the project team receives funds for further promotion and development of the project and sees which functionality is most in demand (or what errors need to be fixed first). And users get the opportunity to influence the development of the project and get the implementation of the most important features for them. It turns out the mutual benefit of the author of the project and its users.

    At the moment, only a project posted on GitHub can be registered on the site and so far only PayPal can be used as a wallet for receiving funds.

    Why is only PayPal used now?

    I want to say right away why now you can add only a PayPal wallet: Because the implementation of this mechanism is the simplest, since I really wanted the funds to go directly to the wallet of the project owner . Otherwise, there would be a bunch of questions: How do we know that money is not stolen? How can we control how many donations actually took place, etc. PayPal has the ability to set up a notification on GitFund that the funds have arrived in the purse of the author of the project and to what extent.

    Just want to note that the site now has only English localization and one method of receiving payments. If the service will be popular, then in the future it will be possible to think about adding localizations, ways to accept donations, etc.

    You may tryGitFund for your project and talk about the results, impressions and ideas in general.

    UPD: As it turned out, the idea did not become popular and did not receive real development. Open Source cannot live on donations in our realities. The project was closed.

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