GitHub Sponsors (or another 'crowd funding' system for WiX)

[bevanweiss]

I've raised it before, but it would be great if you could have another consideration of adding the GitHub Sponsors (or another form of 'lower recurring cost' sponsorship) for the WiX project.

https://github.com/sponsors

It wouldn't replace the existing commercial arrangements in place, and I don't even think it would need to have any 'rewards' associated with it, but I'm sure there's quite a lot of people / projects out there that are using WiX for deployment that would like to be able to contribute (financially) towards the project, but not in the realm of your more corporate style support arrangements.

For an example of the situations this would suit..
I work for an Automation company (in Australia), and I often end up doing little bespoke bits of software for certain end customer projects. I use the WiX Toolset to generate (often very simple) installers so that I don't have to do lots of documentation, or field support calls from customers that deploy and configure things wrong.
My company is very unlikely to have any need to engage FireGiant for these installers (I've done three in the last 6 months, but it was over two years since the one before that), plus USD<->AUD exchange rates, timezones.. all gets tricky. Besides, I enjoy being paid to do the installer stuff that gives me a distraction from the other bits of the job.

However, I do really appreciate the time that Rob / Bob and all the other WiX associated developers have put in, and would gladly sign up to something like $10/month to help it all out... my hope would be that there would be lots of others out there that would do similar.
And that it could just become another revenue stream for FireGiant, but that isn't committed to specific customer/project requirements, so it would provide more (financial) freedom for FireGiant to spend time on 'community issues'... it might not get traction of course.. in which case maybe it only funds a barista coffee every so often.. but it seems worth a crack (although I haven't jumped through the hoops of GitHub Sponsors enrolment.. so it might be overly hard work).

There's 33k .wxs files in GitHub, if each of them brought in $1/month of community funding I'm sure that would enable quite a lot of additional time for those 'community issues' (of which I suspect doco might get some time in the sun)..

Thanks for all the WiX :)

Perhaps others could 'thumbs up' this post if they'd consider such a community sponsorship for WiX (with FireGiant being the administrator of funds).