Just some general advice:

• get regular users. Contributors are going to be a subset of users as another commentor mentioned.
• make sure to have a CONTRIBUTING.md and that it is clear/ easy to follow. Some projects will link to a separate wiki from the .md which is fine. But make sure your “first time contributor” instructions are easy to follow to set up whatever dev environment needed. The less clear the documentation then the more motivated the contributors will need to be.
• if you haven’t already, make issues with feature requests that you are wanting to add. Include enough details that someone other than you will understand your requirements.
• consider a label you use to signify “great issue for a first time contribution”. These should be relatively simple fixes or simple features but give time for someone else to try them instead of completing it right away. Make sure to reference this label in your contribution documentation as a great starting point. If you’re able to get someone to do a simple fix then they will have set up the dev environment and may do other future issues.
• advertise that you’re looking for contributors. Point out your docs, first time contributor label, and any specific features you want/need help with.

Second the Automate The Boring Stuff recommendation, especially if you’re looking for a physical gift (or free online as mentioned)

Id also just in general recommend CS50-python as a free course for python. Engaging lectures, problem sets you can check your solutions, and you finish with a project of your own choosing. No programming background is needed. Don’t buy a verified certificate, the whole course is free along with a free certificate

Everyone has a hobby 🙃

+1 for gitlab. You can programmatically generate a csv file that can be used to generate issue(s) which support markdown format. Then your checklists could be issues and marked as completed when done.

You could also for instance set up a weekly pipeline schedule to generate issue(s) from the csv if some of the issues are needed on an interval.

If gitlab isn’t an option then id still look into generating the .md files this way and finding a home for the .md files that works for your user(s)

And it makes no mention that they were modifying and using GPL code prior to making their code “open source”.

Id argue that this story is not over until the GPL code can be confirmed removed by a third party

There are much smaller projects that ask for more from commits/merge messages. This is a normal ask

The article mentions that the letter indicated intent to petition with the USPTO to cancel the Javascript trademark due to abandonment. Hopefully that is successful since that seems to be the best outcome short of Oracle willingly forfeiting it.

From what i can tell there are no transaction fees for sponsorships from personal accounts, and organizations pay 6% (or 3% if invoicing). (Source)

Is there something else I’m not seeing?

The whole idea to check the donations came from stumbling upon this post which discussed costs per user. Even $1/mo is quite a bit more than the average user cost. So $2 isn’t so measly when putting it into that perspective!

The difference is that commercialization is inherent with a free (libre) open source license. Whereas going against the intent, but still legally gray area, is imo malicious compliance because it circumvents what the license was intended to solve in the first place.

But that’s all i really care to add to this convo, since my initial comment my intent was just to say that the AGPLv3 license does not stop corporations from getting free stuff and being able to charge for it-- especially documentation. Have a good one

No. I said even if they don’t maliciously comply with the license [by making the open sourced code unusable without the backend code or some other means outside of scope of this conversation] then they can charge for it.

The malicous part is in brackets in the above paragraph. The license is an OSI approved license that allows commercialization, it would be stupid for me to call that malicious.

Nothing. The context of this comment thread is “fuck corporations” and then proposing AGPL to solve that. I am merely pointing out that if their goal is to have a non-commercial license then AGPL doesn’t solve that, which is why i mention they can charge for their services with AGPL.

Who hurt you!?

AGPL is the most restrictive OSI approved license (of the commonly used ones), but it is still a free (libre) open source license. My understanding is just that the AGPL believes in the end-users rights to access to the open source needs to be maintained and therefore places some burden to make the source available if it it’s being run on a server.

In general, companies run away from anything AGPL, however, some companies will get creative with it and make their source available but in a way that is useless without the backend. And even if they don’t maliciously comply with the license, they can still charge for their services.

As far as documentation goes, you could license documentation under AGPL, and people could still charge for it. It would just need to be kept available for end-users which i don’t think is really a barrier to use for documentation.

Kebab or snake for ease of parsing through them.

Either i wasn’t clear or you are replying to the wrong person, but i am in support of foss projects asking for donations in a reasonable manor such as this

There is an option to disable it permanently. Otherwise it is once a year and easily dismissed

It’s once per year, easily dismissed, and can be permanently disabled. Seems entirely reasonable for a piece of free software that someone would use everyday

Never. For the most part i haven’t had a question that hasn’t already asked or that couldn’t be answered from reading the docs or some other source. For the cases i get stuck i ask the question to a more focused group

Ive been meaning to move to codeberg, self hosted forgejo, or sourcehut so this will only accelerate that if things get worse.