The dawn of sponsorware (Interview)

Caleb Porzio is the creator & maintainer of Livewire, AlpineJS, and more. His latest open source endeavor was announced as “sponsorware”, which means it lived in a private repo (only available to Caleb’s GitHub Sponsors) until he hit a set sponsorship threshold, at which point it was open sourced.

On this episode, we talk through this sponsorware experiment in-depth. We learn how he dreamt it up, how it went (spoiler: very well), and how he had to change his mindset on 2 things in order to make sustainability possible.

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Sponsors:

• Tidelift – Tidelift is the first managed open source subscription that pays the maintainers of the exact open source projects you depend on while giving you the commercial support you’ve been looking for. Learn more at tidelift.com.

Featuring:

• Caleb Porzio – Website, GitHub, X
• Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• Gitdown
• Livewire
• Alpine.js
• Sushi
• Caleb’s sponsorship page

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!