alt Hacker NewsIt does seem like a worse version of a FOSS donation platform that uses regular old money. I guess one advantage is that you can ensure your money goes directly to using AI to solve specific problems on the codebase, but what does that solve? Are people genuinely worried that if they donate to some FOSS platform that their dollars would go to something else? It seems to me like this removes agency from the FOSS maintainer and gives donators more control over their donation, even though it's explicitly designed not to.
Its efficiency also relies on being better than whatever other platform/harness the maintainer is already using. It's limited to whatever the harness the platform provides, and they're taking a 20% platform fee on top. So I have to, instead of taking $10 from a donor, i take $10 worth of tokens, which may or not be spent more efficiently than me just going in with my claude subscription and fixing it, and I get $8 of those to run in a platform I don't control? In what world as a FOSS maintainer would I sign up for this? It just seems strictly worse than just having a platform that can back resolution of issues with real money... which already exists.
Howdy Solar_Fields, these are great questions and I can give you my thoughts on how I feel it's different than cash donations (which are great if you can get them!). I look at this less like patronage and more an exchange of a resource to meet the needs of both parties. I want to support the projects I care about, some I'll give carte blanche, but some I have no connection to and really just want a bug fixed. Rather than fire up my own Claude Code and throw a PR at that maintainer, instead I'm saying, "hey, you know this codebase and can use this resource (tokens) better than me, please fix it with 'free' tokens." The platform fee is really just for AWS costs and is based on modeling, but I'm sure that's not the final form. Does that make sense?