What is Plate?

Plate is a marketplace for open source enhancements. With Plate, you can assign (small) bounties to enhancement suggestions in open source software.

Plate uses micro crowdfunding to match three financial interests; it 1) enables software users to direct software development with bounties, 2) helps open source software developers earn living, and 3) gives project maintainers a share for ensuring the good quality of the source code. Plate ensures this all happens fairly and takes a small share of each transaction to finance the service.

The goal of plate is to make open source the most popular and financially attractive development model for all software.

All descriptions on this page are current plans and may change in the future.

In practice

All starts with a software enhancement request, an issue, in GitHub. Anyone can create a plate fund on that issue at Plate website by adding some money on it. Any software developer who fixes the issue gets the money on the plate. When multiple software users assign money to one plate, the pile grows and software developers become interested.

A software developer starts working on the enhancement request in hope of grabbing the money on the plate. The developer has temporal pressure as other developers may target that same prize too, and bounties may have an expiration date. On the other hand, the pile of money may also grow as also a lonely cowboy brings in their stake.

When the developer has finished the enhancement, they submit it (send a pull request in GitHub) to the software maintainer to be reviewed. The maintainer of the software project follows their own criteria to decide whether or not to accept the submission.

If the enhancement passes inspection, maintainer merges it to the software source code. Funders get better software and the money on the plate is distributed.

Largest share of the money is given to the developer who fulfills that improvement. Also maintainer of each software project receives a share as a reward for the maintaining efforts and Plate also takes a cut to keep the platform running.

The crowd is happy as they have better software, just as they wanted.

Plate is made for…

…software users (a.k.a. the crowd)

You are the primary customer. You incentivize software developers to work on the enhancement of your preference by putting money on a plate.

The goal of Plate is that software users can direct the development even if they don’t understand anything about programming. Hence, plates include human understandable translations of the notoriously cryptic GitHub issue descriptions.

You now have more to direct how software is developed, please use that power responsibly. And more importantly, use that power. For example, make a social media share of a plate explaining why you it think is important?

Happy browsing, hopefully you can find the right plate(s) for you!

Details:

• You can set an expiry date to your bounty, although please keep in mind that developing quality software takes time.
• Plate cannot guarantee that an enhancement will be implemented as you hoped. You trust your money with the maintainer. (Plate will investigate misconducts.)
• Plates are tied to the original GitHub issue for good. If it disappears unexpectedly and the enhancement is not fulfilled, you get your money back (minus transaction costs).

…developers

Just as before, you are the workforce of open source. But now you get paid for it.

You are essential part of Plate, as a plate transaction completes only after you submit a successful pull request to the corresponding GitHub repository.

You can work on any plate. Keep in mind that other developers can do that too. We are developing measures to enable plate claiming and team forming around a plate.

In the future, it may be possible to finance your living by only implementing plate issues. You will be able to turn your hobby into income while staying independent.

Good luck for your platehunt journey!

Details:

• Please sign in with you GitHub account to Plate so that we can identify you as the one who submitted the pull request.
• Make sure that your pull request is linked to the issue.
• There is a delay before the money is paid. This is to offer the funders a chance to dispute the enhancement. The delay may vary per project.

…maintainers

You are the gatekeeper of plates referred to your repository. You do your maintaining just as before, but now you get a share of each successful plate in you repository as a reward. Your responsibility is to sustain quality of the software even with conflicting interests.

You can also be on the developer side if you wish by solving issues, just remember to do it responsibly and increase the reputation of yourself and your project. And naturally, you can continue using any other sources of income you may already have.

We at Plate are happy to listen to your needs to make this whole thing work. We aim to give as much freedom to maintainers as possible, please contact us if you have any ideas or requests.

Good luck with your project!

Details

• Please make sure that the pull requests are linked with the issue so that plates can be shared automatically.
• If you don’t register to Plate, you don’t get money.
• At some point in the future, you may be able to define how many percentages you get from each plate.

…everyone

If you didn’t feel like you belong to any of the previous groups, no worries. More roles are likely to appear as we make Plate a thriving marketplace of open source development.

If you felt you belong to multiple groups, you seem like a good candidate to benefit from Plate. All users start with same features, so you can just sign up.

Contact

Please tell us what you think. Questions? Ideas? What would make Plate work for you? How would you benefit from Plate the best? All messages are welcome!

juuso(at)plate.fund

We currently guarantee a response to every mail. You can also just ask to be kept posted about Plate as we don’t have an automated mailing list yet.