Hello World

[birkjernstrom]

Why we're building Polar

Open source is the greatest lever for human innovation – ever. Powering all of the products and services that we use and love on a daily basis. Further accelerating our ability and velocity to build towards an even better future. Doing it all in the open to push the boundaries of our craft and make knowledge and opportunities equally accessible to all.

It’s magical. Yet, open source funding to strengthen this lever is broken and outdated. Still relying solely on the donations and sponsorship model. Yielding insufficient backing since capital is always in pursuit of additional value – additional being the operative word.

It made sense last century when software emerged as a nascent industry built by passionate hobbyists for their peers. Since then software has eaten the world and become a multi-multi-trillion dollar industry. Dramatically increasing the adoption, usage and reliance on open source. Today, it’s powering all startups, small businesses to Fortune 500s.

Feedback, bug reports and feature requests are no longer rare and from curious peers. It’s now a constant stream creating an endless backlog of inbound tickets. For maintainers, it quickly goes from a hobby to a stressful and unpaid full-time side gig. For dependents and businesses, they're stuck between 1) waiting without insights or 2) attempt to fix or workaround the issue(s) in forks – both massively inefficient.

It’s a lose-lose. It’s time tooling + funding caught up to reflect and optimize for this new reality and growing needs.

Polar is designed to offer better collaboration and funding between open source maintainers and their community. Enabling backers to pledge behind issues impacting them. Giving maintainers a better overview of what their community desires, is funding and the progress and efforts towards them.

We're just getting started. We're excited to build towards a public beta. Building it in public and open source and shape the product both short- and long-term together with the community.

Let’s build!

[deerdear]

Hej! Love this! Would love to understand how this differs from or is complimentary to e.g., tea.xyz or gitpoap.io ! Let me know if you want to talk more <3

[birkjernstrom]

@deerdear I'm very sorry for the late response here (got buried in notifications). Great question & soon we're going to share a blog post about our vision & v1 intentions that I believe – as a side effect – will clarify this for you as well.

[wiki-me]

So basically the difference between this and bountysource or rysolv is that in polar only the maintainers can work on a feature and in rysolv/bountysource anyone can work on it and get paid?

[birkjernstrom]

Hey @wiki-me. Thanks for the clarifying question.

Today, yes. Only the maintainer receives the pledges once an issue/feature is completed. However, we're working on the ability for maintainers to split that with any potential contributors. It's definitely an important feature and part of our model. Just something we decided to scope out from the initial launch – in the interest of launching early and building in public.

So the key distinction between Polar vs. bounty services with our pledges is: Everything goes through the maintainer(s) and we're equipping them with the insights, capital and tools to reward their contributors. While bounty services allow anyone to post a bounty and anyone to pursue it. However, ultimately it needs to be reviewed, merged and maintained indefinitely by the maintainer(s). By ensuring it all flows via maintainer(s) it:

1. Rewards maintainers as well – key given their efforts
2. Guarantees maintainers are aligned & behind pledges first. Combined with in control on how to expose, delegate and reward it. Avoiding unnecessary friction, bad faith and overhead if such alignment is first made during PR.

Finally, we're just getting started. Pledge/sponsor issues is our first feature of a suite we're building towards to empower maintainers with better tooling to run their initiatives and get funding for it. In fact, I'll be sharing a blog post tomorrow which expands on this initial announcement, shares our V1 goals (incl. a mockup), features and more. I'll share it here once it's live.

PS. Saw your repo on funding guide for open source! Love the initiative! Let me know if I can help in anyway or further clarify things 😊

[birkjernstrom]

@wiki-me Here is the blog post as promised: https://blog.polar.sh/polar-v1-0-lets-fix-open-source-funding/