Now Accepting Donations

Over the years, polybar has grown into a very popular project with thousands of users. This rise in popularity has made the way polybar is maintained no longer sustainable in the long run. Simply keeping up with daily tasks like triaging issues, fixing bugs, and responding to people on Gitter, IRC, and reddit takes up a substantial amount of time.

At the moment, I am the only active member of the polybar team. I want to change that and bring more people in to help sustain polybar and I want to compensate them, at least a little bit, for their work in order to ensure that the success of polybar is not solely relying on people donating their free time working on it.

For that purpose, we have created a collective for polybar over at open collective. Open collective helps projects accept donations and pay for expenses and invoices without all the legal and financial paperwork. Polybar uses the Open Source Collective as a fiscal host (meaning they manage our money). They specialize in providing the financial infrastructure for thousands of open source projects.

How Will The Money Be Used?

Polybar is in the fortunate position that the project does not currently incur any financial cost. We exclusively use free services to host our code, documentation, continuous integration, etc. If we ever need to start paying for certain services, we will use these funds to do so.

But our first goal is to grow the group of polybar maintainers to a sustainable level and to be able to pay them, at least partially, for their work.

After that, there are a lot of things we would like to do in polybar, some of which might benefit from having a financial incentive behind them. We would love to hear what you think about this:

• Paying people to write tests for polybar components.
• Paying someone to triage issues and answering questions.
• Creating bounties to fix certain bugs or implement certain features.

How Can I Help?

If you can and you want to, you can make a donation at our open collective page as either a one-off or a recurring contribution.

Of course, no one is expected to contribute, we love you either way.

Thank you very much for being part of the polybar community and making it what it is today.

— Patrick