I’m going to talk about money but please hear me out.
I’m the maintainer of Workspace Matrix and a couple of other extensions. Recently, extensions.gnome.org got an update that lets me see how often my extensions were downloaded. I was surprised to see a number that is orders of magnitude greater than I would have estimated. This got me thinking… If only 1% of the people using the extension would donate $1, I could spend much more time improving the extension and fixing bugs. It’s also not always easy to ensure compatibility with new GNOME Shell versions which makes mere maintenance non-trivial.
I’ve seen so many extensions that were abandoned because maintenance became too cumbersome or the maintainers lost interest. I as a user of several extensions can only wish that the extensions I rely on keep being available with new GNOME Shell versions. I think it should be easier to donate for extensions to show my appreciation for the maintainers and (hopefully) to ensure the future availability of the extensions. So here is my proposal:
Add a “Donate” button to the extension pages on extensions.gnome.org. It could look like this:
Also, the “Donate” button could be added to gnome-shell-extension-prefs (next to the Settings and Website buttons).
Donation links could be specified in the metadata.json of the extension like this:
{
"donate": [
"https://paypal.me/myusername"
]
}
I chose an array in the JSON because GitHub also supports several options for donations.
Pros: Extension development could become more active and sustainable.
Cons: Money can corrupt everything.
Please let me know what you think.
