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So proud to have SerenityOS & Ladybird onboard Polar. You're such an inspiration and the community is incredible with talented & kind developers uniting to build something many deem impossible to begin with. Thanks for showing that those are the ambitions we should pursue.

Thank you! Yes, we've shipped most of the features mentioned as aspirations in that original post now. We'll soon share an updated one on the big goals for 2024 :)

Agree. I love our issue funding feature (now with contributor rewards too), but it was always part of a larger suite of funding tools we wanted to offer & now can. Getting recurring funding/income (subscriptions) is definitely crucial.

Yes, completely agree re: merchant of record. I've chatted with hundreds of open source maintainers and this has been a big pain point & concern for many. So we wanted to address it. As a platform, we can work with tax professionals & lawyers to help solve this once vs. N times for each maintainer standalone (an impossible burden).

Yes, supporting more platforms is definitely something I see as part of our mission and long-term development. Started with GitHub since it's where most open source initiatives are hosted + analysis on large registries, e.g npm, pypi, confirmed that almost all of them where.

We're big fans of other platforms and looking forward to expand our support. But main focus now is helping open source developers on GitHub get meaningfully more funding & helping more than a few work on it full-time to even start small businesses. Once we've achieved that & proved our product can make a big difference, it's time to expand.

Just to help highlight some big updates since:

- Posts & newsletter support to build direct relationship with your community

- Subscriptions to offer sustainable & recurring funding

- Built-in subscription benefits: Premium posts, Discord invites, Automate sponsor logos in README/site/docs, access to private GitHub repo(s)

- Rewards: Split issue funding with contributors

- Merchant of record & handling VAT for the above

- Public API

We've also lowered our pricing to 5%.

Thank you! :)

> My open source work is a hobby. If you want to give me some money for something I would do anyway, I probably won't say no.

Polar is designed for maintainers and to give them complete control. So you can decide which issues Polar should be embedded on, i.e issues that align with your long-term goals and direction for the initiative. So you can get sponsorship for efforts that align with your goals.

> Or if you and people like you paid me enough consistently that I could quit my day job and focus completely on my OSS projects, then I would probably do that. But even for $1k an hour I don't know that I would want to deal with contractual obligations for my hobby project.

That's the goal, but give us time :-) Pledges/sponsorship towards issues today (Polar v0.1) are not a contractual obligation. As we expand the services we offer, maintainers will have control which ones to leverage. So it's completely up to you what to offer and what not based on your desires and needs. Hopefully, however, Polar at least gives you all the tooling to craft such services and subscriptions.

Great thread and feedback re: administrative considerations. I believe it's our job at Polar to streamline this as much as we can leveraging Stripe Tax, Atlas and more. Of course, it's a massive topic and each country is unique, but give us time and we'll hopefully make things easier than they are today within OSS.

Re: expectation around getting the same $ as for a paid salary as an engineer today. We cannot expect it from Day 1. It's a new pattern. However, since maintainers are in complete control (it's not a traditional bounty service) sponsored issues that are accepted should align with efforts the maintainer wants to pursue too. Before they got $0. Now, they better know what their users want and can get them to sponsor efforts that align with theirs. In addition, we want to support maintainers being able to set explicit "goals" (Kickstarter). You can achieve this today by adding such context as you add Polar to certain issues, but we can streamline it even further.