Proposal to enable GitHub Sponsors

[stlln]

Thanks Youssef for this fork

I've been a user of Meld on macOS for several years, and it has been super essential for development workflow.

The alternatives are mostly commercial and almost all have drawbacks (expensive/specialized for comparing files/underpowered/macOS-only/outdated or abandoned). None of them have the benefits of Meld (especially when doing directory comparison). Having Meld on macOS has been a saving grace.

You mentioned that you're covering the cost for building aarch64 versions. Now that Apple has switched to ARM completely, this is going to be an ongoing thing.

Given the project's impact and potential, I wanted to propose the idea of enabling GitHub Sponsors for this project.

Here are some benefits this could bring:

• Sustainable funding (for build runners, etc.)
• Continued investment for your time
• Incentive for upstream contributions if there is substantial interest (GNOME Meld's maintainer stated that he'd be interested in that)
• App Store version
• Homebrew version resurrected
• Cyberduck style development & maintenance

How we could go about this:

• Move project into own organization (e.g. github.com/meld-macos/meld)
• Enable GitHub Sponsors
• Make yourself the lead maintainer (document build instructions, manage issues, etc.)
• Add additional contributors (not immediately, but maybe eventually.. this could help with implementations, and would also be best practice for open-source project governance. Would also make the project more attractive to potential sponsors)
• Applying for additional organizational sponsorships (can help with reaching out to organizations)

I believe that Meld for macOS is an essential and this could significantly contribute to its growth and sustainability.

This project could serve as a blueprint for more developers who would want to port other GNOME/GTK/KDE apps to macOS. The GNOME Meld maintainers don't intend to add macOS support themselves, and recommend this fork for the macOS version. So, the future of this project is pretty secure and makes this project pretty valuable (as is evident by 2.2k stars on GitHub as well).

Eventually, encouraging additional contribution to this project could mean regular maintenance schedule to merge upstream changes, adding crash tracking, updater, and other essentials to make it even more production-grade, with more first-class support for macOS features. Will keep the fork going strong.

What are your thoughts on this?