Moq is a very famous projects for mocking objects. It’s a top-level project in .NET world. The download amount ranks 12 in nuget package stats. Total downloads is reaching 500 million and 100k download per day.
Moq’s author was complaining very few sponsorship for his project and he created SponsorLink to help developers to more sponsorship and donation although the method is a bit aggressive. SponsorLink may delay your build and show a warning message to non-sponsorred user in its IDE. However, the community complains most is that this component is collecting local git info and send to a private server, which may have break the GDPR.
I don’t have a screenshot of Kzu’s sponsr stats in July. But I remember it’s much less than 70 (Perhaps 10–20?). It looks the author’s complaint works.
Analysis for Different Channels for Sponsorship
I’ve been working on open source projects for about 14 years. I’d like to discuss the real situation about how hard maintainers can get donation and sponsorship by open source projects.
There are a few channels for maintainers to get sponsorship or donation.
- Github sponsor (not available in every country)
- Patreon
- Buy me a coffee
- Crypto coins (such as BTC or Dogecoin)
- P2P transfer (such as Paypal, Alipay, Wechat Pay)
Github sponsor works but usually there is very few sponsors. However, most open source maintainers may have a illusion that they can becomes some top star open source maintainers such as Evan You.
But this is actually a number game. According to my stats, you may get 1 sponsor per 5 million downloads. However, there is still some variety for different types of project. Open source projects with UI (frontend projects) are more easier to get sponsorship or donation from users. Backend projects have to reply on your own while maintaining the project.
Analysis of Vue.js case
Vue.js is a very special case in open source industry. According to npm stats, there are about 3–4 million downloads per week for Vue.js npm package. How about the download stats of your project? Usually it’s several million in total. Moreover, Vue.js is a framework and community compared with React and Angular. And React and Angular team are hired by Facebook and Google with big money. The potential sponsors can understand the cost of talents for a framework like this.
Javascript projects maintainers are more easier to get sponsorship because the projects are usually front-end projects which have UI. However, there are some opposite case in Javascript world such as Fake.js (which is mainly a backend project for test purpose).
And while investigating Evan you’s case, I notice a interesting statement on Evan You’s Patreon. It looks Patreon charges more extra fee than Github.
