Hi, I think this is actually a splendid idea!
I've been thinking about why Maven doesn't have this a lot lately, as I run quite a few projects of my own. OSS is free, but it would make our lives a lot easier, if we had ways to get funding for our projects. I have one such project that gets commissioned work every now and then from corporations that need certain functionality further improved. I don't think this is spam. It's a way for developers to get an extra stream of income to work on the things they love. Nowadays, it seems to be important if not even vital to have several such means of income with the instabilities and mass layoffs happening in the software world. What exactly is wrong with that? Of course, sometimes you will prioritize paid fixes, but that's still in the interest of the project. If there is better visibility for funding options for OSS projects more both projects and developers will thrive. Also -- have a look at Gradle -- they have a company backing the project and funding it. Maven is completely OSS and lacking funding options makes development and fixes much slower paced because people have limited free time to devote to it. In my opinion adding tags for this in the new version of the POM will only help. It will then be up to the respective projects to figure out how to manage the funds. There are great things Maven has brought to the world of software development. However, there are also good ideas it can embrace from other languages and ecosystems. Cheers, Martin On Fri, 22 Aug 2025, 11:58 Gary Gregory, <garydgreg...@gmail.com> wrote: > Our lives are already so flooded with advertising, spam, and scams... do we > really want another vector to watch out for, be irritated by, and ignore? > > Gary > > > On Fri, Aug 22, 2025, 04:53 Olivier Lamy <ol...@apache.org> wrote: > > > Hi, > > While having a play with npm recently, I came across this message: > > 117 packages are looking for funding > > run `npm fund` for details > > > > That got me thinking, why don’t we have something similar in the Maven > > ecosystem? > > > > Plenty of the artifacts published to Maven Central come from > > individuals who’d probably appreciate a small donation (a bit of “beer > > money”), or from companies that provide professional or commercial > > support for their open-source libraries. GitHub already offers a > > funding button, but in the Maven world, we don’t help surface this > > sort of information. > > > > So here’s an idea: what if projects could include > > documented/formalised metadata in their POMs that Maven core and/or > > plugins could use? Since we can’t change the POM structure itself, we > > could start with some standardised properties, for example: > > > > <properties> > > <support.commercial.0>URL</support.commercial.0> > > <support.eol.0>DATE</support.eol.0> > > <support.security.0>DATE</support.security.0> > > <support.commercial.1>URL</support.commercial.1> > > > > <funding.url.0>URL</funding.url.0> > > <funding.url.1>URL</funding.url.1> > > </properties> > > > > We could then imagine new goals such as: > > - dependency:fund > > - dependency:support > > > > And, just like npm, Maven could finish the build with a simple summary: > > > > X artefacts have commercial support or are looking for funding > > run mvn dependency:fund or mvn dependency:support for details > > > > To be clear, this isn’t about Apache Maven requiring the metadata, but > > rather about encouraging a general convention for artifacts in Maven > > Central. > > > > What do you reckon? > > > > Cheers, > > Olivier > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@maven.apache.org > > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@maven.apache.org > > > > >
