23 September 2013
Follow @alloyTL;DR: While we very much appreciate the sentiment, the project (as an entity) does not accept financial donations.
- We are passionate about sharing. This means that we will spend time on CocoaPods in our spare-time, even when that is not of immediate financial benefit to us (as described in point 2), but we do get pleasure from working on something that can improve our small piece of the universe, without expecting any financial gains.
It is important to note, though, that the reason we have the opportunity to enjoy this form of spiritual fulfilment is only possible because we’re in well enough financial positions to be able to do this for free. We’re very much aware that some people are in much less fortunate positions and OSS donations are a real source of income.
In principle, we use CocoaPods for our paid work and as such spend time on improving it during work hours. Normally you should still invoice a client for setting up a project, so if that time is usually diminished, the times where we do have to spend some time on CocoaPods for a specific project is balanced out and usually tilts in favour of the client.
CocoaPods, and OSS in general, is our LinkedIn. We get to meet a lot of people around the world, which often leads to great opportunities for our careers in the future. This might not always be obvious to people, but it should not be underestimated.
Financial donations do add a feeling of responsibility, for some, without the financial compensation we would normally offset that with. I.e. our hourly rates for contracting work would be much higher than a typical donation. The reason we do not want to add such feelings of responsibility is that it’s important for us, in the globally connected, fast-paced world we live in, to be able to say “not now, I feel like doing something completely different”. Burnout is something that can hit prolific open-source people pretty fast and we need to actively counteract that.
So what can you do?
- Helping out with CocoaPods comes in many forms. For those that are not able to help out with (Ruby) code issues, there are still ways to do so. Writing documentation and triaging tickets before they get to us are probably the most helpful in the sense of relieving us from financial ‘losses’, as they save us a whole lot of time.
Also, by providing the tools for a vibrant community to do their magic, we benefit from the great Objective-C libraries that you all write and so we all do our part in the grand scheme of things.
As a company, you can contract people of the core team for CocoaPods related work on your project.
As a company you can ‘sponsor’ by contracting people of the core team to implement specific features your company needs in CocoaPods (as this is real paid work, as opposed to donations, the tickets you sponsor will be prioritised over others), or implement general CocoaPods improvements, which serve the community as a whole.
Other ways of sponsoring includes wide ranging topics, such as, legal consultancy, t-shirts, stickers, etc.
Note that we do recognise companies for the work described in this section as ‘sponsors’, of which we keep a list in the README.
- Finally, as said before, individual people might be in a less fortunate financial position and as such it’s perfectly ok to send donations through means like Patreon, if that individual accepts that. These are not considered to be specific for the CocoaPods project, though.
