Accept donations also via GitHub sponsors

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#1

I am recommending 2 things:

  1. Enable the ‘red Sponsor button’ on GitHub
  2. Enable Ardour to receive donations directly through GitHub

1. Enable the Sponsors button

Example project with the Sponsor button (try clicking it): https://github.com/babel/babel

Someone who is admin on the repo needs to:

Now our donate page has more visibility and might be discovered by more people.

2. Receive donations via Github

  • (I have set this up personally, and it took me ~10 minutes.)
  • We have to provide proof of id, tax number etc.

The biggest benefit I see, is that it is great exposure. If I am supporting Ardour via GitHub, and someone looks at my profile, they can see who I am sponsoring and discover Ardour that way.

I am not suggesting we close the other platform, but only add this one.

GitHub sponsors offers Zero fees (for now) and they match every donation up to 5000$ / year.

Read more:

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#2

Apply before January 1st, 2020 to be eligible for the match.

#3

GitHub will not charge fees for GitHub Sponsors. And to celebrate the launch, we’ll cover payment processing costs for the first year of the program—through May 2020

…and after May 2020 ?

There’s not a lot of information on the Terms-of-Service and https://help.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-source-community-with-github-sponsors/about-github-sponsors is light on detail.

I expect this to be hard to integrate with Ardour’s subscription service that grants access to updates. Updating the payment system is not something to do lightly and needs some justification.

That being said, as additional donation service, it is very interesting. Github uses Stripe for processing, so that could be an alternative for some users with a paypal aversion. Still, there’s also the question of what benefit there is of adding another middle-man. Not only with github harvest information, but also stripe. It might be prudent to wait until there’s more detail available.

Ardour’s target audience are musicians, not developers. I expect github donation will mostly benefit tools-to-make-tools and infrastructure projects.

#4

I was only thinking about those who wanted to support without getting anything instead. So no need to integrate with the current system. Of course that would be nice but like you said, it probably requires a lot of effort.

But for now, is there anything stopping us with going with option 1?

Simply enabling the Sponsor button, and then add our external page (https://community.ardour.org/donate) similar to what the Babel project does?

#5

It’s really @paul’s call, but I won’t use it until github clearly states what the fees will be, what the terms-of-service are, under what conditions they can suspend the account, what information they collect and with whom they share this information, etc.

Personally I had bad experience with them in the past (I received some invalid DMCA take-down notice from github), and would feel much more comfortable with gitlab that is not under US jurisdiction.

1 Like
#6

To clarify: Option 1 is only about adding a link - without agreeing to any terms and services etc.

Ardour on GitHub has over 1.400 stars, which means people (most likely developers) are checking it out on GitHub.

This is not a question about which platform to use, or if Micro$oft owns it etc, just adding a link to drive more traffic to our donation page.

#7

It’s not a direct link. it sends feedback to github before redirecting.

#8

I can personally see no benefits of following up on this.

#9

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