Sponsoring offer about mockito

[mockitoguy]

@uweschaefer, can we get back to you in a couple of days?

@TimvdLippe, let's chat over slack - wanted to bounce an idea off you

[TimvdLippe]

@mockitoguy We started a thread on Slack, let's discuss indeed.

[TimvdLippe]

@donaldpipowitch Thanks for the ping. We are discussing atm how we can streamline the donation process. @raphw can you respond to the message from @mockitoguy on Slack?

[TimvdLippe]

@mockitoguy If I remember correctly, you setup the Tidelift subscription so that you could dedicate time to the project while being paid by companies. Based on recent activity and the information on Tidelift, I don't think we ever got there, did we? In that case, I think it makes more sense to remove the Tidelift subscription and at least clarify that we don't take sponsorships for Mockito.

@uweschaefer Thank you for considering Mockito as sponsoring project! Since Mockito does not have dedicated maintainers (I mean, I am but a complete volunteer), we don't have people available to dedicate time to it on an official basis. Therefore, we also historically decided not to take money to such an extent and have instead requested donations to be made in our name to charities that we ourselves appreciate.

@mockito/developers I propose that we once again choose a charity among each others and propose that Prisma sends the money there? To be clear: there will be no commitment from our side to support the project, as we continue to operate on it on a volunteer basis. This has worked (or for some definition of working) in the past years and I don't think we are likely to change that anytime soon. So please take that into consideration when donating and what to expect from Mockito.

If you do appreciate Mockito and would like to contribute fixes to the broader community, we prefer that as well. When companies reached out with questions on how to help, we usually either ask for charity donations or for dedicated engineering time to fix issues that affect the Mockito community. After all, the most precious resource we are lacking is dedicated engineering time, which is not really feasible given the maturity of Mockito. It's not a fulltime job, but one that takes a couple of hours a week to keep alive and well-maintained.

Thanks again for your support and looking forward to whatever comes out of it!

[uweschaefer]

Thanks for coming back and i am glad to hear you have some ideas floating around.
We wanted to get this done in '23, but we understand things like these take time.

Just as a possible inspiration: if it makes things easier for you, we could also imagine to book an expensive training workshop about the non-obvious parts of mockito. Just mentioning it, because you advertise it on mockito.org.

[uweschaefer]

Any shareable progress on this?

[TimvdLippe]

We have yet to hear from @mockitoguy

@mockito/developers what do you suggest on how to proceed? I propose we remove Tidelift as our sponsor and add a SPONSORING.md that instead states that you can contact us and we request the money to be sent to a charity of our choosing. We can do a collective charity or a round robin style, whatever you feel comfortable with.

[raphw]

I love the charity concept as I already donate money and this is a tax efficient extension to it. @mockitoguy Should we setup a proposal?

[donaldpipowitch]

Hi, I'm in the same company as @uweschaefer. We run a bit out of time for (by now) last years sponsoring budget. It would be nice if we could hear back from you by the end of the week with a working sponsoring channel.
If it doesn't work this time we might be able to consider you for this year's sponsoring - but this would only be in a couple of months.

[mockitoguy]

Hey @donaldpipowitch and @uweschaefer!

Thank you for getting back to us with the sponsoring offer and sorry for slow replies. We are happy to contribute our time to the open source projects and we don't expect donations. We set up Tidelift a few years back and any funds from them we've been using for social impact where it was most needed. If we set up a Mockito account on a service like buymeacoffee (which supports one-time dontations), would this be convenient for you to support Mockito financially? We haven't set up this before so checking with you if that's workable.

Thanks again!