Comment by Havoc
2 years ago
Interesting that people voluntarily pay. Write-up of bloggers doing the "buy me a coffee" button suggested to me that nobody pays like that.
I guess software is a bit more tangible than a blog post even if both have value.
One difference I can see is the "buy me a coffee" button isn't a "these are the people who bought me a coffee" list. I imagine most of these sponsors (from their perspective) are paying for advertising.
Ah good point
Sounds like good advertising! If these companies are trying to sell hardware corresponding to this software, then having a callout right in the software's README is a great way to attract people who are discovering the project through GitHub. This wouldn't work as well if the product was oriented toward non-technical people (not discovering it through GitHub) or if the software wasn't directly related to the hardware (most OSS projects are probably run on general-purpose hardware).