As jMonkeyEngine continues its transition into the next stages of it’s online presence, we unfortunately come to the situation of monetary support, what it means, and how it’s used.
For a large portion of jMonkey’s life many of the online technologies used have been obtained via sponsorship agreements with large companies, some of which are freely available to everyone and some of which require criterea to be obtained. For the past 3 years Digital Ocean have been sponsoring our server with their open-source sponsorship program, and with careful and considered decisions, has allowed jMonkey to operate virtually cost-free for the duration of that time. Unfortunately that sponsorship program has now ended and Digital Ocean is not willing to consider us for another term in their program, and jMonkeyEngine is now in the situation of supporting itself financially in order to continue to provide the online services we have become used to.
In light of this change of events we are branching into Patreon dontations to not only maintain our existing presence, but improve upon it.
Patreon is a global crowd-funding platform that allows users to pledge their support to jMonkeyEngine and help drive the engine forward. All funding received from Patreon is used entirely for the improvement of jMonkey and will allow us to:
Pay for hosting of some web services (community hub, software store, etc).
Pay talented developers, modellers and artists to create new prodcts under a permissive license and improve the the project progression speed.
Offer prizes to developers that have produced notable improvements to the project (Amazon/Apple/Android/etc gift cards).
With your support we will have the opportunity to prioritize areas of the engine that require attention, bring in new engine capabilities, and provide a plethora of tools and utilities to make using the engine a more comfortable experience.
Thank you to those that have already pledged their support, to those that are going to, and to the community as a whole for being the super-helpful people that you are!
JmonkeyEngine is, and always will be a free, open-source project. No splash screens, no fees and no requirement to mention jMonkeyEngine in your game at all.
Fact is, the company where i work, is willing to share required resources for hosting webpages etc. (already told that before)
Next time, please communicate with other core-devs/community, before adding JME monetary support to own account.(because noone knew whats going on since there is no Jmonkey company, and trully it should be described properly)
I already suggested some fixes, like proper one would be “support developrs” button that would lead to each core-developer patreon, or there would be just You(Jayfella)(if none of other core-devs would want, with note who exactly pay for DO servers)
Also Github sponsors that mitm linked seams reasonable.
We typically try not to provide hosting for smaller projects which could be hosted at other “free” hosting services such as Github. We do not have the infrastructure set up to provide hosting to thousands of smaller projects, but would prefer to focus our efforts on hosting those projects that have grown too large to fit in at free hosted service but cannot (yet) afford to pay for hosting at a hosting company.
Edit: JME seems to meet this criteria. We currently are forced to bust the project into several small projects just to use github, like how docs are separate from engine, so is web site.
Ok. The patreon page is no longer accepting payments. The software store is being closed and the hub payments is now your problem. I’ll reverse the main page back to the old one and you guys can do it all yourself.
But don’t worry. Despite the fact that I walked the walk and did exactly what i outlined to be done and actively getting positive results, both @oxplay2 and @RiccardoBlb have been very vocal in explaining to me that pretty much every key I’ve pressed was a bad idea. I’m sure now I’m no longer participating in these projects they will provide you with better services, team management, server management, funding and websites than I had previously done.
It’s been fun. I think I’m about ready to move on to other projects. Good luck with all your endeavors.
Feel free to revoke my priveleges. I no longer require them.
So let me get this straight, you can get 5k free money, possibly even get fully hosted for entire project so no out of pocket costs and STILL collect money for support and that trips your trigger?
It stems from an argument yesterday in discord and isn’t just from your comment. I think the pushback is the proverbial straw that broke the camels back.
As we scale up operations for Sponsors, we want to be fair and welcoming to all of the amazing developers who’ve applied. We’re inviting people off the waitlist in randomized order, prioritizing folks who’ve received recommendations from others.
We’re sourcing recommendations from two places:
Recommendation form : We’d love to hear who you’d like to see receive sponsorship in the program! If you’d like to recommend another developer for GitHub Sponsors, please fill out this form.
Waitlist applications : When a developer applies to Sponsors, one of the questions we ask is: “What developers would you like to sponsor through GitHub Sponsors who aren’t already part of the program?” We’re using these recommendations to better understand which contributors the open source community is most eager to support.
How do you determine if FUNDING.yml will natively support a platform? Why isn’t my platform of choice supported?
Several of you have reached out asking why we don’t support certain platforms (including PayPal and Venmo) natively in FUNDING.yml , the file for configuring a “Sponsor” button on a repo. Great question!
We decided to leave PayPal, Venmo, and others out of the set of supported platforms because there is a less explicit social contract for where the money is going compared to platforms like Patreon, Open Collective, Tidelift, and Community Bridge, to name a few of the platforms we do support. Those are community, creator, open source, or developer-focused—and they make it clear that you are supporting the work of the person or team developing code in that repository.
We support custom fields so we can monitor funding methods we might not have known about, and iterate accordingly. Good news is you can put PayPal—or any other link—in the custom field, too.
If the community gets behind this by asking for sponsorship and we hit the 5k limit thats a 10k influx of cash. How long could the forum and store survive with 10k?
One of the longest lived open source java projects on the internet starting in June 2003. See Learning jME3 History
Edit: I don’t know who owns the repo, name and such but they should fill out the form for the Oregon State sponsorship request I linked to above. Only takes a few minute of your time.
Edit: Should also request to be on the waitlist for github.
There are always opposing and friendly thoughts every time at the start of something. We can resolve all these issues and misunderstandings one by one.
I’m all for discussion. I’m all for criticism. I’m all for being wrong and learning something. There has been more than one public converstaion on this forum where I have had to hold my hands up and say I am wrong. I am humbled and learned by it. I hope I am a better person for it. But where I draw line is being accused of being monetarily shady. Not cool at all.
This is a public project with my real name and address with public monetary accounting. Publically open accusations and insinuation of something detrimental to my standing as a person of business and profession by members of staff that I personally promoted for their work(!) is shocking.
You know what you’re right. I ask for no praise for my small part in a very big machine, but this entire movement was/is to promote and praise the hard work of everybody and it would be unfair on those that have put so much effort in it to have progression faulted by motivations I cannot understand.
I’m still quite angry. It’s late here in the UK. The services will be restored tomorrow.
Jay has been trying to wrangle this into something manageable. The folks “with the keys” effectively disappeared so he’s been trying to manage the project going forward… sort of taking on what Erlend used to do to push things forward. Sorely needed if this project is to live on.
It’s a thankless and grating job, to be sure.
I think everyone needs to be a little more patient, a lot more grateful, and a bit more helpful than posting links without explanation.
I had no idea this stuff was going on behind the scenes. All I did was post what I thought was helpful.
I don’t get how doubling your contributions, getting free hosting and being able to continue everything as is already being done could need further explanation or even be considered offensive.
I was going to ignore this thread, but since you are trying so hard to get me involved, there you go.
I never publically accusate or insinuate you of being shady. What i said is that:
It is unclear what the patreon page is about, and who is promising the things in the different tiers.
I asked who “jmonkey” is to which you never replied
I said that it would probably better to know exactly who is collecting the donations, instead of having “jmonkey” that could mean the core devs, the contributors, who knows…
And i said that this plus the fact that the page was the repurposed asset store patreon page, might not look right for the random person that doesn’t know you.
Do you think this is unreasonable?
In all this there is one objective truth, in your patreon page you are promising things on behalf of jmonkeyengine to which i’ve never agreed.
I think at the end you recognized that i had at least some points, since you changed the page title… and honestly i was going to accept this as a middle ground, it’s unfortunate that the discussion continued in this thread.
Add together a heated discussion offline and the fact that your post-without-any-explanation came right after a post continuing that argument… and it looked a bit like you were piling onto the “you didn’t need to do any of this because you could have done this other thing” pile.
