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GitHub Sponsors

• caniszczyk 7y ago
  cool feature but putting the burden of funding on individuals vs companies is supporting what I call the "open source gig economy" - doesn't work well for Patreon and others - we need better ways to sustain individuals who choose not start their own company around open source projects or work full time at a company supporting open source https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-source-gig-economy-and-sustainability-tip-jar/ https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-...
  • Heliosmaster 7y ago
    In the Clojure community we have Clojurists Together [0] which is just a program that allows both companies and individual (at different prices) to contribute funding the development of Open Source projects. I think that model works quite well. [0]: https://www.clojuriststogether.org/ https://www.clojuriststogether.org/
  • Kiro 7y ago
    > doesn't work well for Patreon and others What do you mean? What's wrong with Patreon?
    • caniszczyk 7y ago
      "Take Patreon as an example, a popular funding platform for all sorts of things including open source projects that has been around since 2013 and has paid out $1 billion to creators since then. While that’s an astonishing figure, Patreon isn’t a sustainable business with its current private company model and level of VC funding of $105M: “Under the company’s current business model, 90 percent of funds are paid directly to content creators. Patreon takes 5 percent, and the remaining 5 percent covers transaction fees.” Patreon CEO Jack Conte said in an interview with CNBC, that the platform will soon be facing the challenge of maintaining a profitable model as the company continues its growth. In 2019, the company is also on track to pay out $500 million to content creators, 5% of that is $25 million and Patreon has ~300 employees, so probably not even covering their labor costs." https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/crowd-funding-platform-patreon-announces-it-will-pay-out-half-a-billion-dollars-to-content-creators-in-2019.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/crowd-funding-platform-patre...
      • AYBABTME 7y ago
        It's a bit mind blowing to think that Patreon is 300 employees. What are they all doing?
        • kabacha 7y ago
          I wonder that too. Liberapay is just as capable open platform being run by like 10 people, right?
          • Kye 7y ago
            Like most VC-funded startups, they have a huge staff of people whose job it is to promote Patreon and manage larger accounts.
      • pdimitar 7y ago
        > Patreon CEO Jack Conte said in an interview with CNBC, that the platform will soon be facing the challenge of maintaining a profitable model as the company continues its growth. "growth" -- for a company that is nothing more than an intermediary with a well-established platform. What do they need to grow for? If anything, it's time for some cuts actually.
      • pbhjpbhj 7y ago
        Sounds like that's plenty to cover wages of £60k ($80k USD) gross, which is double the median graduate salary in the UK. I guess compared to what people earn in SV it's pocket change?
      • Kye 7y ago
        They made some recent changes meant to address this: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/360024952552-New-Creator-Plans https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/360024952552-N... Whether or not it'll work is an open question.
• benjaminsuch 7y ago
  I love this. It's actually huge, but I wonder why you have to apply for a waitlist in order to be able to get sponsored? Why wouldn't we be allowed to sponsor anyone? I suppose it has something to do to prevent money laundry?
  • nindalf 7y ago
    Makes sense to scale a product slowly.
  • anastalaz 7y ago
    I guess because it is still in limited beta. Pretty sure it's gonna open for everyone in the future.
• mushufasa 7y ago
  This seems like it's needed and (dareisay) overdue? Integrating sponsorship subscriptions into the core experience is sure to increase payments, a la twitch subscriptions/payments (which Youtube is just now copying). I imagine this will change the fundamental dynamics around OSS projects, but not sure how, nor whether it is all positive. - If maintainers can see who donated, do they prioritize issues / pull requests? (I think that could be a good thing actually). - Do companies use GitHub sponsorships to judge the health of dependencies? Will they create budgets to support their dependencies systematically? - Does this hurt FOSS contributions, because now people start to expect to be paid rather than doing it for inherent motivations? Will this generate toxic politics among project contributors regarding who gets credit + gets paid? - Will this mean that microsoft gets a bunch of PII on top-notch developers (have to enter name + address info to receive or send payments), and get much more value from that data than I can imagine?
  • diggan 7y ago
    > This seems like it's needed and (dareisay) overdue? Seems what they are planning to offer is not better nor different than what others already are providing (see OpenCollective or LiberaPay). In fact, it seems less than the existing options. The existing options are open platforms with open source code. What GitHub is introducing, seems to be a loss-leader (they give free cash away) for the sole purpose of getting attention. It's obvious the feature they are now introducing is not for making the ecosystem better, but to lock the ecosystem harder to GitHub.
    • plAH2 7y ago
      Sad that the truth is always downvoted. HN has a lot of Microsoft shills. People will wake up when Nadella has moved all jobs to India.
      • hestefisk 7y ago
        Don’t think that will happen anytime soon (India).
      • dang 7y ago
• yreg 7y ago
  For now, it seems that the Microsoft acquisition has gone well, right?
  • romanovcode 7y ago
    Yes, free private repos alone was amazing and now this? With 2x matching (up to 5k) from MS themselves - this is amazing. If only they would release something similar to GitLab Runner a.k.a. GitHub Runner it would be golden!
    • harrygeez 7y ago
      don't toy with my feelings. If we get GitHub Runner GitLab will be toast
    • rymate1234 7y ago
      Don't they already have this with Azure Pipelines?
    • Heliosmaster 7y ago
      Totally agree. Running your own gitlab runner is the feature of GitLab I would want the most on GitHub
    • rurban 7y ago
      I think their commercial Github Enterprise product does this exactly.
  • diggan 7y ago
    I disagree. Before the acquisition, the work on GitHub was to make GitHub sustainable in it's own right. Now, with Microsoft owning it, they have given up on that idea since Microsoft mainly get their profits elsewhere. Instead, GitHub have now become a loss-leader for Microsoft, where every feature is meant to either lock in open developers in a closed source platform, or attract more open source developers to use their platform. I did like the way of old GitHub more, even though they were slower at releasing stuff.
• 0xADEADBEE 7y ago
  It's interesting to see the gradual monetization of Open Source. 10 years ago this was just something you did for fun but with the proliferation of services charging for it, the landscape is shifting rapidly. Github are moving in some interesting directions and it'll be interesting to see if they can stay ahead of the competition with how trivial it is to migrate to a rival. I wouldn't bet on them personally but it'll be fun to watch either way!
  • hp 7y ago
    As someone who was around 10 years ago I'd question that a little, there were lots of OSS companies then, and lots of people getting hired and paid to work on OSS too. A difference today is trying to move some of the money down to smaller-scale projects that have little chance of becoming a standalone company, and also more options to get paid without having to go work at a big company.
• gigatexal 7y ago
  Leave it to Microsoft to finally figure out a way to get people and more importantly businesses to fund OSS work.
  • OrangeManBad 7y ago
    * Getting linux on desktop. Check * Getting OSS contributors paid. Check Unlike Google, it seems Microsoft (Satya) isn't just doing OSS for PR but he probably sincerely believes in it. Thanks also to Hanselman who seemingly has been a major pro-OSS voice.
    • techntoke 7y ago
      WSL is absolutely terrible and can't be taken seriously.
      • rudiv 7y ago
        Maybe for your use case, but there are plenty of basic applications for which it works fine, if a little slow. The WSL2 implementation should make it fully competitive option for lightweight tasks like frontend web dev and introductory programming - if MS's figures on performance improvements are accurate. WSL replacing Linux in the near future is, as you say, not a serious concern. But it being a viable alternative for a portion of the people who would normally use desktop Linux is quite realistic, I think. What say?
        • techntoke 7y ago
          When it is released it will likely be as buggy as WSL is today. WSL is over 20x slower due to Microsoft's crappy filesystem. They are still using a custom kernel even though it is a VM now. I don't have high hopes about their terminal either.
  • thrownaway954 7y ago
    Microsoft has really become "less evil" in the last couple of years.
• alphast0rm 7y ago
  If I click on any of the actual sponsor buttons it redirects to https://github.com/users/$user/sponsorship https://github.com/users/$user/sponsorship and 404's. Happening for anybody else?
  • haddr 7y ago
    happens for me too
• skilled 7y ago
  Damn! This is surely an amazing QoL feature. Well done.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• seren 7y ago
  A logical next step would be to add bounty on specific bugs or features requests. If a company is relying on open source, and has no capability to fix a critical bug (which is a bad strategy but it certainly happens), it would probably be ready to pay a hefty sum so that the maintainer, or anyone involved in the project, will have at least a look at it. Today, unless you can contact directly the maintainer and hope he or she has some spare time, I don't know how you can solve that kind of issue. However, I am not sure who will decide a bug is fixed or a feature properly implemented.
  • blauditore 7y ago
    One not-so-bad solution could be similar to what StackOverflow does: The issuer of the bounty may decide who gets it. But even if they don't issue it to anyone, they don't receive their sum back. There there currency is points, but if it's real money, any unreleased bounties could go to some kind of general community pot for that project or whole Github after a while.
  • return1 7y ago
    i think worklist.net has created a bidding platform that works that way. it's not popular, but something like that on github be pretty popular imho.
  • seanabrahams 7y ago
    This 1000x. I spoke to a designer at GitHub specifically about this a few years ago. Their initial concern was over-complicating the UI/UX. There's no doubt they've discussed this internally and I'm very curious what the hold up is.
  • ShamelessC 7y ago
    Seems like it would give people the wrong idea.
• nstart 7y ago
  I love this. I do wonder though if anyone can educate me on the choice to do a monthly sponsorship? I think that's awesome but at the same time, there are a lot of developers I want to send 10 dollar tips to for that library that they made. Just wondering if there's a reason to not have both. My guess is that foregoing one time transactions in favour of ensuring that people gravitate towards making a more sustainable donation seemed like a rational choice. Pure speculation there so if there's any other reason why it wasn't done I'd be really grateful if anyone from Github might be able to share.
  • spiderfarmer 7y ago
    I would like a onetime donation as well. Especially since there are a lot of small, usefull projects that don't need a lot of maintenance.
    • lallysingh 7y ago
      And some of those developers don't need the money, but would love for their tip-jar to auto-feed into a charity (or other project!) of their choice.
  • msadowski 7y ago
    I also think it's about sustainability. As a developer receiving an X amount every month (+/- Y%) can heavily reduce the financial risk and help plan better. I'm currently not developing any open source software but if I was and worked as a freelancer knowing that by the end of the month I'll receive $500 for GitHub would allow me to balance my open source work with the freelance work, ensuring I have enough money to support myself.
    • adrianmsmith 7y ago
      If they offered both (monthly and one-time payments) then the solution would be to allow the project to allow only one or the other or both or neither. So you could select that you'd only receive monthly payments and people wouldn't be able to send you one-time payments.
• gowthamgts12 7y ago
  A one time contribution would be great - since I personally cannot afford sponsoring monthly.
  • rurban 7y ago
    I think that you can set it up, and cancel it after one month. It's just a simple click.
• hdv011 7y ago
  What's stopping me creating a sponsored project and donating myself $5,000 to get a free $5,000?
  • ulucs 7y ago
    Microsoft's lawyers?
  • mushufasa 7y ago
    I'm guessing part of the waitlist requires an application where they gather info for fraud prevention. I'm sure you'll need to enter PII to send and receive payments -- MSFT doesn't strike me as a BTC operation. Money laundering is illegal :).
    • zawerf 7y ago
      What info can possibly prevent this fraud though? Even the real large projects could ask friends and family to donate 5k that they gift back later. It's so easy/undetectable to do it's just leaving free money on the table.
      • kkarakk 7y ago
        Well the IRS would have something to say about it for sure, i doubt github would hide the transactions from them...
    • PretzelPirate 7y ago
      Interestingly enough, Microsoft sponsored issues using GitCoin and paid out bounties in Dai.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• drtse4 7y ago
  Finally, and they also allow to specify additional external funding platforms via .yaml file (no more wondering if a patreon account is legit or not).
• mlaa1 7y ago
  Judging by the pictures, a couple of people manage to get themselves into the headlines yet again. A further step towards turning Open Source into a popularity contest, which is needed to destroy it.
• harrygeez 7y ago
  GitHub is really on a roll lately. Another long awaited feature, if a little late.
• buro9 7y ago
  I run community sites for which I am paid donations to cover running costs including writing code, bug fixes, servers, etc. Today I take donations via PayPal, but the catch with this is that it's hard to provide visibility to donors of how healthy this is (WRT to costs), and whilst I considered Patreon that seemed to be very focused on creative deliverables to donors of a non-code/service nature. I am trying Browser Attention Tokens, but these feel to be detached from the delivery of code, and still don't provide enough visibility to the donors of the overall health of the projects. This though... this could be good. If Github sponsorship were attached to projects and people donated to a given org or repo, and then that were visible "this repo receives $500 per month" it would encourage code contribution whilst providing visibility over the health of a project. I know my donors would appreciate the visibility (as would I, I manually create periodic reports on income and costs - at least this solves the income side). The only question I have is how easy it would be for those who don't use Github to subscribe to a recurring donation? Edit: Signed up for the waitlist, received a link to https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-github-sponsors https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-github-sponsors which appears to clarify that you'd be sponsoring a developer not a repo/org... which means popularity/celebrity is everything. Oh well.
  • diggan 7y ago
    Have you looked at other alternatives like OpenCollective or LiberaPay? Basically identical to what GitHub is now introducing, but with the nice feature of being open platforms and not seen as loss-leaders for their owner.
  • toper-centage 7y ago
    LiberaPay seems popular with developers. But Patreon is not unheard of either. The guy that codes Inkscape is on Patreon for instance.
  • pdimitar 7y ago
    > visible "this repo receives $500 per month" it would encourage code contribution whilst providing visibility over the health of a project. I fear this might snowball. Many people don't donate if they see a project with very small donations. It goes like this: "well, my contribution would not make any difference anyway"... The reverse is also true: "this guy is OBVIOUSLY doing something right if he gets $500 a month for OSS work, I'll donate!". Yet another example of whales vs. small fish. As you said in your edit, it will likely encourage celebrity cheering and everybody else won't get a cent as before.
• marktani 7y ago
  I support one project on Open Collective [1] on a monthly basis. They do take a cut from the money I donate to cover the credit card fees and their operational costs. GitHub Support does not take any fees and even matches donations... wow! While this news sounds amazing on the surface, I am also concerned it might have negative effects on the OSS ecosystem overall. Let's see how this pans out! [1] https://opencollective.com/ https://opencollective.com/
  • rqs 7y ago
    > GitHub Support does not take any fees and even matches donations... wow! Maybe I didn't fully understand what "cut" means, but .... > In the first year, GitHub will not charge any fees, so 100% of sponsorships will go to the sponsored developer. In the future, we may charge a nominal processing fee. https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-github-sponsors https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-github-sponsors
    • marktani 7y ago
      You're right I didn't read that passage at first glance. In a year, both donation matching and 0 fees may very well be gone.
      • Spivak 7y ago
        If they only charge the card processing fee I'd say that's still pretty darn good. Although I wouldn't necessarily be mad if they charged more than that. The incentives seem to align pretty well. GH makes money when people support OSS.
    • fesoliveira 7y ago
      Keep in mind that they will only take a payment processing fee, unlike other services that charge a cut from the payment in order to pay for their services, or at least that is what it says for now.
      • 0xffff2 7y ago
• kabacha 7y ago
  I was really expecting GitLab to double down on features like this to attract floss community, but this coming from now Microsoft's GitHub is trully surprising. I hope GitHub is working on some more social features as I feel like bringing back my project to GitHub more and more these days. That being I think it's a great idea as we had many of bounty/subscription tools but they always fail to get adopted and in general lack proper integrations with projects itself. Bounty integration in issue tracker has been on my wishlist forever now, can we get that going next?
• nojvek 7y ago
  This is real nice to see. I Sponsor hzoo through patreon but may do it through GitHub sponsors. Babel is a great project. What i’d really love to see is GitHub bounties though. Like you want a feature bad or a bug fixed because you depend on it. You can assign it some monetary value. GitHub is the escrow. When the bug/feature is done and verified by people who put the bounty, it gets paid out to the implementors.
• mherrmann 7y ago
  Would be cool if there was an easy way to sponsor all the projects I've starred. Then I could just pay (say) $10 per month to "support open source", without having to worry about any of the details such as picking projects.
• rdl 7y ago
  This is great; it's basically either 1) an alternative to Patreon for developers (which is something I have always wanted to exist) or 2) an alternative to Patreon for Patreon creators who are the tiniest bit intelligent and able to actually use GitHub (every aspect of Patreon is bad for creators, so this is an upgrade, except in user reach). The missing element here is a nice end-user focused browsing experience, layered on top. A user-focused portal which lets you subscribe to projects, sponsor them on GitHub, and see updates, with GitHub behind the scenes.
  • honzzz 7y ago
    > every aspect of Patreon is bad for creators Why? What do you mean exactly?
    • rdl 7y ago
      Their content creator tools are shit. No integration with anything people use, and they are pretty buggy. They are capricious censors. I’d be fine with a platform articulating an arbitrary censorship policy and then following it. They don’t do thst — instead they just do what they want and justify it post hoc. They don’t have a real business model and they are too small to operate as a loss leader.
• zapita 7y ago
  I’m glad open-source maintainers will get one more way to get paid... But it feels wrong to lock this into a git hosting platform. Maintainer payment is important enough to be a first-class product, open and accessible to all... instead it’s being used as a bargaining chip to keep developers on a hosting platform. The subtext is pretty clear: “if you want to get paid, you better not leave Github!”. Meanwhile nonprofits and startups focused on solving the problem of open-source sustainability for everyone, not just Github customers, will suffer from this announcement. I think that’s a shame.
  • zapita 7y ago
    Replying to myself with a different perspective... On the other hand, from Github’s point of view it just makes sense to do this. And in a way, it raises the bar for dedicated providers of open-source sponsorships. If they can’t provide something clearly better than Github’s built-in feature, then maybe their service just isn’t good enough. Of course maybe they can’t compete properly unless Github plays fair and opens the required APIs to the competition.
  • return1 7y ago
    On the other hand it provides a way to measure the performance of the people being sponsored. it's a good fit.
  • jnbiche 7y ago
    Arguably, it's going to take the popularity of Github to make this a thing. Others have tried and failed (more or less) to establish an independent, first-class product to fund software developers. Some devs are getting some play on Patreon, but Patreon is more oriented toward areas other than FOSS. Assuming this succeeds, it will be a function of the network effect. Github has a large enough base of users to sustain this kind of project.
  • gmueckl 7y ago
    I also think that is is effectively a pretty underhanded move to cement Github and monopolize open source development. It may not be intended to work this way, but if this campaign is successful, it will have this chilling effect. Once development funds go mostly through Github, the platform's influence over a project is greatly increased. Projects would have little choice but to comply with whatever ToS change Github would want to impose. MS playing nice with open source starts to smell a bit like an attempt to ensnare and trap developers in an MS ecosystem. But this time around it is not about Windows as a target platform, but about dependencies on tools (VSCode), libraries (.NET Standard) and services (Github, Azure) provided by them.
• trpc 7y ago
  Does this service work also per project or per user only?
  • rurban 7y ago
    User only. Only a user has the payment setting in its configuration. But you can set it up via a custom tier, with a special amount per month, and divide it then amongst your org. Everything is public and transparent, so you got oversight.
• thinkingemote 7y ago
  This is also about making developers behave. If you want to get paid on GitHub you shouldn't commit anything controversial and you have to behave on the site. If they go full Twitch then they could take into consideration your actions outside the site. including posts on social media or at conferences. So we would first see those wikileak dumps, code leaks and vulnerability repos being got rid of first, then we might see right wing bloggers who code being denied monetisation. Who wants to see Nazis get funded? Or even perhaps if your code still uses slave and master and you won't change then maybe repos can't be sponsored. With monetization comes control. Opaque rules and decisions and no consistency. It won't come in the first year but it will come soon enough after developers are fully invested into using it for their livelihoods.
  • anchpop 7y ago
    The reason Twitch does all that stuff is because they are beholden to advertisers and nobody wants to be advertising on "the site with all the white nationalists" or whatever, it isn't a good look. Github doesn't have that issue since they do not have a model based on advertising
• issuehuntcoo 7y ago
  Great to see GitHub is finally introducing a direct way to support OSS developers. Try IssueHunt (https://issuehunt.io/ https://issuehunt.io/) as well! A open-source bounty platform for open source. Great place for open source developers to earn extra cash!
• Toine 7y ago
  From the signup page : > What are your preferred pronouns? (optional) So this is actually happening ?
  • jraph 7y ago
    I am seeing this trend of asking or indicating one's preferred pronoun more and more. I find asking people how they would like to be referred to as a really positive thing and I fail to see any downside for this trend. And since this is optional, nobody is forced to answer the question.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • oliyoung 7y ago
    it's great right?
• sktrdie 7y ago
  Sorry to bring my ethical and philosophical view on the subject but I don't agree with forcing a capitalist system to something that is essentially volunteer work. Open source has worked fine being just volunteer for the past several decades. In fact I'd argue it's one of the only ecosystem that keeps on being awesome. I don't think adding money to the equation will change any of this. In fact it might risk making it worst.
  • throwaway_7718 7y ago
    I feel the same way, honestly. Thinking of it in a different way - torvalds and gregkh get paid by the Linux Foundation. Say it went bankrupt, they would surely need to get other jobs, unless they were sponsored by the community. Many developers of the kernel today are sponsored by their employers. The question is, how many of them would do it (out of sheer enthusiasm) if they aren't getting paid to?
  • hp 7y ago
    I'd argue that money's been in OSS since its inception. To try to put a number on it, here's a random study that 50% of oss is people at their paid job: https://dirkriehle.com/2013/08/22/paid-vs-volunteer-work-in-open-source/ https://dirkriehle.com/2013/08/22/paid-vs-volunteer-work-in-... But anecdotally that number is consistent with my experience. When we created the GNOME Foundation in 2000, it was in part to manage the commercial vendors and money involved (Compaq, Eazel, Helix Code, IBM, Sun Microsystems and VA Linux Systems, see the press release https://www.gnome.org/press/2000/08/red-hat-joins-industry-vendors-as-a-founding-member-of-the-gnome-foundation/ https://www.gnome.org/press/2000/08/red-hat-joins-industry-v...). This was not at all unique to GNOME, same kinda stuff around all the major projects at that time. One thing I think is new and constructive is more ways to pay maintainers without asking them to join a giant company.
  • eclipseo76 7y ago
    Who's forcing anything? It's op-in. I welcome our capitalist overlord with open-arms if they want to sponsor my volunteer work. It's a win-win scenario.
• nickjj 7y ago
  It's an interesting idea but I wonder what will make this different than gittip from years ago, or gratipay, or Patreon, or just having a "donate" button in your README file. I guess I'm just skeptical in that this will change anything for the developers who are trying to make some type of income for their contributions. On a related note, DHH recorded a very nice keynote at Railsconf 2019 on expectations of payments in open source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBwWbFpkltg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBwWbFpkltg
• usrusr 7y ago
  I think it's a very compelling deal: under the patreon model (company takes a cut to fund the funding mechanism), the "platform tax" is a permanent sore that makes donating feel less good than it could. Am I giving to the cause or am I giving to the platform? An independent zero fee platform run entirely on altruism will always be in the edge of failure, with one of the failure modes being transfer to untrustworthy operators. A commercial zero fee platform run as a loss leader on a perfectly obvious business case just makes sense. It's clear that both ends of the transaction "pay" by adding relevance to the platform, but that's a positive sum game.
  • 0xffff2 7y ago
    >GitHub will not charge fees for GitHub Sponsors. And to celebrate the launch, we’ll cover payment processing costs for the first year, too! One-hundred percent of your sponsorship goes to the developer. My reading is that they're only going to forgo the fees for the first year, and after that it's going to be basically similar to Patreon in terms of where the money goes.
    • dangjc 7y ago
      Maybe they meant credit card interchange fees of 1-3%?
      • diggan 7y ago
        If there is money being moved around on GitHub's platform, you can be sure that they are interested in grabbing a piece of it. Otherwise, why not integrate with existing open platforms?
        • captn3m0 7y ago
          Because they can control it and use it as a moat.
      • 0xffff2 7y ago
        Maybe so, but when did we suddenly start giving companies like Microsoft the benefit of the doubt on stuff like this?
• thosakwe 7y ago
  This is a game changer for people like me, who do a lot of open source work, but might not have the pockets to sustainably continue putting in so many hours each week (i.e. students).
• kodablah 7y ago
  This is such a watershed moment in the history of software development that I don't think most of us can grasp its significance yet. Sure we're familiar with other services that do the same, but the adoption rate (like for GH itself) will be clearly different. One could argue that this is more societally important than YouTube, Twitch, etc funded content for _consuming_ because this funds content for _leveraging_ to build/work on top of. And this is not just limited to the entrepreneurial devs out there, of which "the man" has new employment competition with now. It can also fund entire company departments. I look forward to mass adoption of this, wallet in hand.
  • thomasfedb 7y ago
    While I understand why others are wary, I am also excited about the good that this could do for OSS projects. I know I've struggled in the past to give money to projects that make me a profit. The third party tools are hardly brilliant, and maintainers have to set them up, and look after them. This has the potential to be a really good thing.
  • stephenr 7y ago
    > but the adoption rate (like for GH itself) will be clearly different. How many individuals have a paid GH account vs a free one? Now how many of those are willing to donate to a project/person but hasn't already done so?
  • dawhizkid 7y ago
    The big unknown here is that the MVP is sponsoring individual contributors vs an entire project. Of course it is technically easier to build, and removes GitHub from having to build logic or tools on how to divide contributions fairly among contributors, but it opens up questions on perceived fairness among contributors to a given project e.g. what happens when one contributor, for whatever reason, receives far more contributions than another equal contributor? Will that lead to infighting, jealousy, turnover, lawsuits, loss of motivation?
  • robotzero 7y ago
    LOL! I think you might be a tad overstating the significance of this.
• NKCSS 7y ago
  I'd be tempted to sign up and just donate $5k to myself to get the 100% match.... #freemoney
  • jabits 7y ago
    Well then you’d be stealing...that’s a real downside to me.
    • NKCSS 7y ago
      No, it would be immoral, which is why I would not do it, but I'm also sure a lot of people won't have that problem.
• throwaway_7718 7y ago
  Say a sponsored developer Bob has some software, that another person, Alice forks. The fork becomes wildly more successful than the original for some reason, and Bob loses many sponsors in the course of time. Would a situation like this force developers to use restrictive licenses? (I get that Bob can just integrate Alice's fork into his original - assume that it's too much work for Bob to do so)
  • nine_k 7y ago
    Won't a restrictive license mean fewer users, and thus fewer sponsors?
  • munmaek 7y ago
    This... doesn't make much sense. An open-source license (one that is actually recognized as such by OSI[0]), means that anyone can fork the code and contribute to it at the very minimum. The only way to stop this would be to use a non open source license (or none at all, making it effectively source-available), but nobody would want to donate to someone making only source-available or closed-source projects. The reality is that people would just have to choose, unfortunately. [0]: https://opensource.org/licenses https://opensource.org/licenses
• dsumenkovic 7y ago
  Great news! I hope this will enhance the development of many great open source projects. This has already been discussed at GitLab and it would be nice if something similar is implemented on other platforms as well. Here's the issue with more details https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/43468 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/43468
• discordance 7y ago
  @Github/Microsoft feature request: It would be nice to see sponsorship or bounties for individual issues in Github.
• thrownaway954 7y ago
  this would a slam dunk if you could sponsor projects or organizations besides just developers. if that happened, this would destroy patreon and paypal in the donation space for OSS projects.
  • return1 7y ago
    otoh, sponsoring developers avoids the friction between teams about how to share sponsorships etc. they should offer both though
    • techntoke 7y ago
      No, it gives the owners of the team/org the ability to distribute funds as they wish. There should be no friction.
• euph0ria 7y ago
  Great feature! Something to consider for the feature which would allow us to donate more is: 1) Sponsor a project rather an individual developer 2) Sponsor a specific issue/bug
  • mritchie712 7y ago
    I would absolutely sponsor issue's. It'd be a great way to lure people into a longer term sponsorship.
• k__ 7y ago
  Microsoft is gonna centralize the sh*t out of the eco-system. Let's see how it goes this time.
  • yoavm 7y ago
    To be fair, it's us who created this problem, not Microsoft. GitHub was too central long before Microsoft acquired it.
• always4getpass 7y ago
  While seemingly good news and will definitely have positive side effects to open source projects, I cannot stop myself from questioning if this is just good old Microsoft using one of its edges over Gitlab (money) to come on top. After all, this is the embrace, extend, and extinguish company. Anyhow, I'm looking forward to see a similar feature implemented by Gitlab, even without the matching donations.
  • btasovac 7y ago
    > Anyhow, I'm looking forward to see a similar feature implemented by Gitlab, even without the matching donations. You can check out this issue [1]. Please upvote it if you want to see this implemented, or join the discussion if you have any additional ideas. [1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/43468 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/43468
  • anc84 7y ago
    This is EXTEND.
• os7borne 7y ago
  Wow! Long overdue. I'm not capable enough to contribute technically to the open source projects which I use. This will be a great way for me to make my contribution. Also, I do believe this is a plus for open source projects that often find it tough to stay afloat because of financial constraints.
• buremba 7y ago
  This might be a deal-breaker not only from the developers' side but also from the business side. If the companies see that a project is well-funded, they can invest their time (maybe their money also?) more confidently. It might become a real marketplace at some point and let (some of the) open-source businesses to focus on their project rather than starting a company and dealing with boring business work.
• diggan 7y ago
  Ugh, not again! First they introduce a Package Registry that not only splits the ecosystem in two parts but also has no open governance or even open source code. Great. Now they are doing the same thing with donations. Instead of collaborating with already open platforms (like OpenCollective or LiberaPay), they decide to build their own closed-source platform. I love that more people are figuring out ways to pay open source developers, but doing it via a closed-source platform they developed on their own, they are effectively saying they don't care about "open development", they just want to be the one-stop for everything open source as to not lose mind-share of developers. I'd be wary of joining this program and I urge people to get involved with something like OpenCollective instead, which is a open project you can actually contribute to. It also helps that OpenCollective's success is based on it's members success. "GitHub Sponsors" isn't as well aligned with you as a developer, as OpenCollective et al. Obviously, I'm a bit biased, as I run a project for creating transparent open source infrastructure. But I do think this is a important issue, and I'm getting more and more scared GitHub is out to make open source development more ivory tower-like.
  • Leace 7y ago
    > Obviously, I'm a bit biased, as I run a project for creating transparent open source infrastructure. But I do think this is a important issue, and I'm getting more and more scared GitHub is out to make open source development more ivory tower-like. This point is brought many times. Why use GitHub if we can host git repositories anywhere? (A: GitHub providers discovery). Why use GitHub PRs if we have mailing lists? (A: GitHub has better UX). The same is with their Sponsors program, registering billing method and clicking on a button is all that's needed. No separate sites with different UI. For the record I'm also not happy with the centralized structure of it (it reminds me of early Google), but I get why it's getting popular.
    • diggan 7y ago
      I love the UX of GitHub and don't get me wrong, I use and depend on GitHub for my day-to-day work and also my own hobbies. I do understand that people like it as well. It's so easy to get started and it just works, most of the time. But it just doesn't sit well with me, that we as open source developers, are depending on a platform that is closed-source for so much. I think I could see past that, if GitHub in itself was sustainable. But with the new owner who sees GitHub as a way to get marketshare of developers, and not as it's own entity, it's hard to continue to cheer on them. When Microsoft have to either increase profits/decrease expenses and they choose between Azure and GitHub, I'm pretty sure the effort will either be to decrease the expenses of GitHub, or increase the profits of Azure. None of those two ways are good for the users of GitHub in the long-term.
• dessant 7y ago
  This is the best thing to have happened to open source since GitHub has launched. Thank you to whomever has internally pushed for it!
• amirathi 7y ago
  To summarize, - OSS contributors on GitHub can apply to become "sponsored developer" to accept donations - Developer sets monthly sponsorship tiers (amounts & benefits) - GitHub will match upto $5k in donation in Developer's first year (1:1 match) - GitHub will not charge any fees in the first year - In the future, they may charge a nominal processing fee - Currently only individuals can donate to individuals, org/team support (on both sides) to come soon
• return1 7y ago
  They should also launch one-off contributions for people who want particular features . Still a great move , and loooong overdue, i hope it succeeds massively.
• asdkhadsj 7y ago
  Well damn, this is sneaky and I love it. I say sneaky, because I was in a situation where I mentally debated Github vs Gitlab. This tips it a bit towards Githubs favor. Not that I'm even planning on being sponsored or w/e, but simply that I already view GH as a social network for a thing I love (code), but now it seems even more.. socially.. if that makes sense. Purely my perception of course.
  • techntoke 7y ago
    GitLab actually has an open source SCM that you can selfhost.
• devonzuegel 7y ago
  Hi, I’m Devon the product manager behind GitHub Sponsors. We’re excited to launch the beta program today and learn how we can best serve the community. It’s great to already see the conversation on this thread! We’re eager to hear all of your feedback, and feel free to email me at devonzuegel@github.com as well.
  • diggan 7y ago
    Hello there Devon! I'd be interested to hear what the main reasons for not either a) building on top of existing open platforms (like OpenCollective) or b) doing your own service but building it open source and as a open platform? Also, once the one year period is over, how are you planning to setup the fee structure?
    • hanniabu 7y ago
      This would be nice if there was some integration between the two.
    • stephenr 7y ago
      > doing your own service but building it open source and as a open platform Why would they ever do this? Practically nothing they do is Open Source.
      • diggan 7y ago
        Well, they trying to put themselves in the middle of open source. Why wouldn't they, if they really care about their users, not just getting profits?
        • stephenr 7y ago
          > if they really care about their users, not just getting profits? [citation needed]
          • diggan 7y ago
• hp 7y ago
  Just wanted to add here for those interested in this kind of thing, that we have over 4000 packages with income maintainers can claim today on Tidelift. If you're a maintainer, ctrl-f through this list and see if you're in there: https://blog.tidelift.com/is-your-package-eligible-for-income-on-tidelift-heres-the-complete-list-may-2019 https://blog.tidelift.com/is-your-package-eligible-for-incom... Tidelift is also supported via the new GitHub Sponsors feature: https://tidelift.com/subscription/how-to-connect-tidelift-with-github https://tidelift.com/subscription/how-to-connect-tidelift-wi... If you aren't in the 4000+ packages we have income for now, you can still sign up (which helps us get to subscribers who are specifically using your stuff, meaning income in the future).
• beager 7y ago
  I’m excited about this but fearful that it will create unfair (I.e. monetary) incentive structures for FOSS maintenance.
  • dual_basis 7y ago
    Monetary == unfair? Why?
    • beager 7y ago
      Imagine you’re a solo maintainer of an NPM package, and you know that one of the FAANG companies uses your package. Normally, you respond to issues on weekends and cut new builds when reasonable bugs are reported. Then, the FAANGco starts sponsoring you, a pittance for them but a solid amount for you. They put in issues and submit PRs that are intended for their own use case, or even worse, that constrain the utility of the package to that company’s use case. Other people put in issues, but let’s be real, they’re not sponsoring you. A maintainer can reject an issue or PR from a sponsor to keep the package pure and generalized, but would risk getting that sponsorship revoked. And if you don’t think coercion would be involved in that, think again. It is FOSS so someone could fork it. But then, you’ve got a situation where potentially tens of thousands of projects and consumers would have to switch over. All straw men for sure, but I am thinking that the ecosystem of FOSS might be shook by this, from both the maintainer and consumer side.
      • dual_basis 7y ago
        I don't know, I don't really see it as a problem. What is the difference between this and FANGco hiring the developer to specialize the product for them in-house, which is something that happens often?
• pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  It would be interesting to see if most of the people who are cautious/guarded/hostile about this are older people who've seen Microsoft work their "magic" before.
• koolba 7y ago
  > To supercharge community funding, GitHub created the GitHub Sponsors Matching Fund, which matches up to $5000 per sponsored developer in their first year of sponsorship. In the first year, GitHub will not charge any fees, so 100% of sponsorships will go to the sponsored developer. In the future, we may charge a nominal processing fee. What's to stop me^Wsomeone else and their friend from sponsoring each other for $5K to collect the $5K in matching funds?
  • AsyncAwait 7y ago
    Idk, you can abuse everything. Does that mean nothing that could be abused should exist? I expect them to at least verify that you're doing some useful work on GitHub. If you are, I don't even particularly mind you exploiting this, even if it's perhaps not ideal.
    • marktani 7y ago
      Perhaps you don't mind it, but it would be interesting to know more about GitHub's and Microsoft's thoughts/thought process on this topic.
  • xbryanx 7y ago
    A fraud conviction.
  • pluma 7y ago
    Well, that would be fraud and illegal. Other than that, nothing. What's stopping you from conning an old lady out of her pension?
    • koolba 7y ago
      Why would it be fraud? We both contribute to open source projects and appreciate the effort that the other contributes.
      • pluma 7y ago
        I don't know whether you're trolling or simply naive but that's clearly fraud and the scenario you describe explicitly aims to commit fraud. At the very least it's violating the terms of service. But very clearly the two of you would have conspired to defraud GitHub and in this case there would even be evidence in the form of an HN comment where you literally ask if this would work. You may think you're clever but trust me when I tell you that no, you're not, and I've seen enough people try to be exceptionally clever and think "plausible deniability" would cover their butts and then get sued for fraud.
• benatkin 7y ago
  Not so fast. People have said this about gittip (now Gratipay), Patreon, Twitch, and now YouTube and Facebook. All of these have been mixed blessings. Here's an article about how Patreon doesn't work out even when everything goes smoothly: https://theoutline.com/post/2571/no-one-makes-a-living-on-patreon?zd=1&zi=e4lqrxpb https://theoutline.com/post/2571/no-one-makes-a-living-on-pa... "After launching my Patreon, I struggled for months to find work. Patreon filled my downtime, and became a full time job itself. I’d spend hours combing through photos, looking back on notes I’d taken on the road, researching where I’d been. I’d post on Twitter and Instagram with teasers, free stories, anything to attract my followers to my Patreon page. I made friends on the site, I shared their projects on my own social media, and kept up with all my subscribers’ projects. It was a lot of work for little pay, but I was determined. A year later my monthly earnings on Patreon have grown from $120 to $163." $163 a month in extra income? Cool, right? Not when you spend 5+ hours a week thinking about it. If GitHub gets a lot of participation it will be unsustainable to only take a little on top of a credit card processing fee, and the fee it will be increased to be more like Facebook's 30% cut. There are plenty of articles on here about the costs and difficulties of running a payment platform.
  • gilbetron 7y ago
    I am wary of the excitement as well, but there's a bit difference: corporations. Spending $20/month on a patreon is entirely different than spending the same on a library I make heavy use of at my job. I can easily convince my boss to do that; that type of money isn't even "noise" for most companies!
    • osd 7y ago
      $20 is less than a drop in the bucket, but $20 dollars for essentially a donation is another matter. For the companies that already contribute monetarily to open source, I don't think much changes. The unfortunate reality is that for companies who don't, not much changes.
    • reggieband 7y ago
      In my experience at a reasonably large corp ... getting the bureaucracy to spend $20/month is somehow more of a pain than getting it to spend $50,000/month. For the kind of dollar values most github supporters are working in (probably in the range of less than $1000/year) - a single yearly lump sum would be easier to expense directly on a corporate card rather than getting accounting involved monthly.
• SquishyPanda23 7y ago
  I have been curious for a while what Microsoft plans for LinkedIn and GitHub. It seems like one possible future here is that open source becomes less like passion projects that scratch an itch and more like driving for Uber. Maybe that is good. Maybe GitHub just took a step toward becoming Fiverr. I really don't know.
  • pingucrimson 7y ago
    > Maybe that is good. How is that good?
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
      Maybe the quality would improve? There's a condition I call "open-source-itis" that a lot of projects suffer from, where tons of new features (usually of dubious merit) get added but nobody ever bothers to fix bugs or make sure the foundation is actually solid. It makes sense, because that's unsexy work that people generally don't want to do and they're all working for free, but it makes a lot of open source software really crap. However, if people were getting paid for fixing bugs and cleaning up old code, maybe that'd improve.
      • naniwaduni 7y ago
        I'd expect it to get worse. People pay for features over maintenance even more strongly than they allocate prestige.
        • libria 7y ago
          Nah, there's a bug out there right now blocking my work I'd throw money at if I could. I can't be the only one who feels like this.
          • james-skemp 7y ago
            Rich, the creator of the Phaser framework, does something like this (I haven't dug into it much): https://github.com/photonstorm/phaser/issues/3390 https://github.com/photonstorm/phaser/issues/3390 It appears they leverage Bountysource (not familiar with it).
• samirillian 7y ago
  New mode of production please lord anything but capitalism
• gilbetron 7y ago
  I wonder if this will create pressure to consolidate projects - there might be a non-linearity in the perception of project value. Two tiny repos may seem worth X each, but combined they may seem large enough to generate > 2X.
• nautilus12 7y ago
  Could this end up in commodotizing software engineering so much that it will drive the prices of software engineering down even further? How long till we are like panhandlers on the street throwing code at people in exchange for lunch money?
• raphlinus 7y ago
  I am cautiously optimistic about this. I recently built a prototype GPU-based 2D renderer which I think has huge potential, but obviously also needs quite a bit of work to become a real product. I've been considering various kinds of hybrid open source business models, where there's a free part but also parts people pay for. I'm pretty sure that can fly, but I'm also hesitating at the idea of spending a huge amount of my time and energy on building a business - I want to concentrate on the tech itself. If I can get close to paying cost of living through sponsorship, that's pretty appealing. For this to really fly, though, needs to come revenue streams from businesses who depend on open source, rather than other individuals. I'm hopeful this can get there.
• ceronman 7y ago
  I've been trying to find out which countries are eligible to receive payments, but I haven't found any information. Most likely I expect this to be like Kickstarter where basically only developers living in certain developed countries can participate.
• joshfraser 7y ago
  The best part of open-source is that draws in people who are focused on long-term benefits instead of short-term profit. Contributing to open-source projects teaches you how to write better code, how to work well with other developers and how to communicate your ideas effectively. It also gives you a network of other super smart people who can open all sorts of doors for you once you earn their respect. Money is a funny thing. Introducing money into something that you were previously doing out of passion completely changes the dynamic. Take sex for example. I like that Github Sponsors seems to be focused on supporting the developer for their ongoing efforts instead of being too transactional. Other companies have tried incentivizing specific features or bug fixes but they tend to draw in mercenaries who do the bare minimum to get the reward. This seems like a much better way to go. I'm impressed by the way Github are rolling this out. It will be interesting to watch how it changes the nature of open-source.
• ElijahLynn 7y ago
  $1 is the lowest amount I have seen by clicking the big blue "Start Sponsoring" button and then making it to https://github.com/users/dominikh/sponsorship https://github.com/users/dominikh/sponsorship. So it appears users can choose their own levels, I do wonder what the minimum is.
• ElijahLynn 7y ago
  Your move GitLab!
  • techntoke 7y ago
    GitLab actually has an open source SCM platform and developers have always been free to put links to their favorite sponsorship platforms in the readme, wiki or on their GitLab Pages site built using their favorite generators. Your move GitHub.
• VikingCoder 7y ago
  Awesome! Some Feature Requests: 1) Let me sponsor a project, not a person 2) Let a project have a private, or a public, allocation of how funding goes. At first, simple percents would be awesome. 3) Let a project assign funding to another project. Probably one it depends on. 4) For a given project, let me see which other projects are funding it. 5) Allow the set up of Unions. These five projects all have one pool where all the money goes, which is then divided back to the projects by some percentage. 6) Fund a charity. If this person or project receives money, please directly send it to a specified charity instead. (Don't make the person who receives the donation have to handle the paperwork for it.) 7) Try to make it easy to set up a sponsorship in your will 8) Let a project use their funding to pay for hosting, directly. So, I give to some project, they pay for CPU and Storage on some cloud host. I'm certain there are legal complications with all of these ideas. If you solve the legal issues, that would be amazing. Cheers!
  • return1 7y ago
    They can have all these if they allow "pay with Ethereum".
  • TkTech 7y ago
    For #1, it looks like that's coming? The documentation[1] has been updated for project sponsor buttons to include up to 4 github-sponsor enabled users. I can't find a project using it yet, but I imagine this divides your donation to the project among the 4? [1]: https://help.github.com/en/articles/displaying-a-sponsor-button-in-your-repository#displaying-a-sponsor-button-in-your-repository https://help.github.com/en/articles/displaying-a-sponsor-but...
  • alannallama 7y ago
    Open Collective already offers many of these features.
• xwdv 7y ago
  I don’t like this. There has always been a purity around writing open source software simply for the benefit of mankind. Let’s not kid ourselves, probably no one is going to make a living from github sponsors, and projects that bring in any significant money are probably written by developers who already make good money do something else anyway. This would basically be beer money to them. You would be amazed at how people that do not contribute any sort of money to an open source software project will come in and make demands to the creator to implement some feature or fix some bug. Now imagine if they donate $10 and suddenly feel like there is a debt the creator must pay to them by doing what they want. I will not be using github sponsors for my open source projects. Instead I will continue to ask for things like tickets to conferences or speaking engagements where I can better develop my brand and clout. That’s the way it should be, but that’s just my opinion.
  • radium3d 7y ago
    Don't let them manipulate you. Assert your policy that they are paying for the software as it is at the time of donation. I would donate with the same thought without any expectations of further development because of my donation. Only that the software has already helped me in its current state.
    • JoshuaRLi 7y ago
      Exactly this. The "purity" of OSS development needs to be reflected in the "purity" of donations for this to work. Small donations should represent nothing more than a token of appreciation. Large donations, well... money shouldn't buy project influence, though that is easier said. It's a complicated matter of corporate sponsored engineers contributing both good and bad (influence wise) patches back to OSS, but people need to make a living somehow.
    • radium3d 7y ago
      Just wanted to add that you as a developer put the work up-front so there absolutely should be no expectation that the donation is for future work but instead for the work that has already been done.
  • 7y ago
• bshipp 7y ago
  Hi Devon, I think this is a great idea. speaking as someone working for a small company with the ability to sponsor projects of interest, could you evaluate the possibility of assigning rewards to specific milestones? for example, if I'm using a particular FOSS library and see that the maintainer has set up certain functionality as a long-term milestone could I attach a sort of carrot to a particular milestone to provide incentive to continue development? This would be in conjunction with standard sponsorship, of course. But, for some developers, it's easier to find the motivation to complete a task if there is a defined reward waiting at the end of it. it doesn't even have to be new functionality; it could simply be implementing a testing protocol to meet internal corporate requirements, or reorganizing old code to fit new standards; stuff that's necessary but boring and shoved to the bottom of the pile for a hobby project. This might really open up the corporate pursestrings instead of relying on individual contributions.
• Vordimous 7y ago
  Can i just give myself $5K and get the matched $5K?
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• polskibus 7y ago
  Is this the embrace, extend, extinguish method at work? Introducing a feature that would likely not translate to significant income boost, only to widen the appeal of the free tier? There are plenty of similar sites like others have already mentioned, surely GitHub could've just helped them integrate better instead? Insteaf of developing this feature, maybe GitHub could've spent more time enhancing their issue tracker to be able to fit more complex workflows if necessary? There's always opportunity cost that should be considered when working on new features for such a large userbase.
• magnamerc 7y ago
  Is this GitHub's version of a GitCoin competitor?
• dawhizkid 7y ago
  It looks like you sponsor an individual and not necessarily an entire project. I get that it is wayyy less complex to build that MVP, but I wonder how project dynamics will change if you have a team of, say, 3 core contributors that are in actuality dividing work fairly evenly but one contributor is for some reason getting 50%, 100%, 200%+ more in contributions than another contributor.
• rswail 7y ago
  As I've read the comments here, I've realized that I really don't like the idea. This puts: a) A lot of power into the control of Github b) changes the entire incentive model for FOSS development c) devalues the aspects of a "sharing economy" and "co-opetition" that FOSS has grown. My question: Will a sponsored person be able to see who has donated to them? That should be kept anonymous. Otherwise people will be able to "buy" the feature they want over others. Community interests will be lost.
  • Heliosmaster 7y ago
    There are quite a few OS projects saying that they will prioritize bugs that affect sponsor. And even here on HN it's not a rare comment 'If a company cares about it, they could pay somebody to fix the bug`.
  • briandear 7y ago
    So don’t use sponsorship. Nobody is requiring it. That’s a decision that the project can make. The more dogmatic open source projects wouldn’t use Github anyway.
• Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  Really neat! As someone who works on open-source full time and is largely sponsored by my users, here's my take: The good: - gets money into open source with an intuitive and accessible interface that will get it to the forefront of people's minds - they're the only platform that isn't taking a slice off the top (yet) - (temporary) donation matching and eating payment processing fees The bad: - a few projects on github are disproportionately large and influential and will probably receive a majority of the funds from this - this risks creating a stronger form of platform lock-in than ever: who's going to switch to sourcehut when their github repo makes them real world money? I find this interesting because it runs into a place where my interests are seriously split. I depend on funding for my open source projects and this seems like a really necessary and powerful move that fills a gaping hole in the ecosystem, and might do it really well. At the same time, I'm working on a competing platform to GitHub and I'm worried about getting people locked into a proprietary platform. I have always recommended that people who accept donations for their open-source work avoid putting all of their eggs into one basket, like Patreon, in case that platform changes in a way they dislike. I encourage that for anyone interested in this GitHub offering as well, and I signed up for the waitlist to see how it goes. I still keep a number of projects there and will for the foreseeable future, so it might be a nice revenue source. I have put a lot of thought into open source funding in general, I'd love to sit down with the team and chat if they have the time. Shoot me an email: sir@cmpwn.com.
  • return1 7y ago
    > a few projects on github are disproportionately large and influential Since this is github though, this is probably more of a marketplace than a donation-market. There is definitely some supply-demand dynamics rather than just patronship
  • justinclift 7y ago
    It'll also be interesting to see how GitHub competitors respond. GitLab may be in a position to do so, unsure about others.
  • pault 7y ago
    Is there any reason why you couldn't mirror your repo on github for the donations platform?
• patcon 7y ago
  This is NOT about helping us out, fellow maintainer-kids, it's about owning the playground and burning the forest. This fee structure is predatory af & straight outta amazon's playbook. (2x matching funds and all fees waived for first year?[1]) There has been an ecosystem. If this was about anything except market capture through burning VC/reserve funding, GitHub would have engaged in existing nacent and experimental spaces. They haven't: http://opencollective.com/github http://opencollective.com/github If a company is truly trying to be embody open culture, they support and and-yes existing projects as step 1. Case in point: https://words.steveklabnik.com/why-im-partnering-with-balanced https://words.steveklabnik.com/why-im-partnering-with-balanc... If we have a problem or idea for OpenCollective/Liberapay/etc, the staff live on open chat rooms -- the github issue queues are public -- the code is interrogable by the curious and adventurous. With GitHub, we get bupkis. Or wait, we get coaxed into a one-on-one email support channel where we can't see one another, speak together, nor find fellow travellers. Or we get the unofficial wailing wall that is https://github.com/isaacs/github https://github.com/isaacs/github Really disappointed in the lack of critical reflection from technologists. This is not good for us as executed. [1]: https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-github-sponsors#about-the-github-sponsors-matching-fund https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-github-sponsors#ab...
  • rtempaccount1 7y ago
    Can I ask where you're getting that info. on the fee structure, I can't see that on their pages easily. From reading the FAQ it sounds like there are no fees in the first year at all and afterwards it's a payment processing fee? Also I got the impression that matching was Github adding additional funds to the payment, sounds like not a bad thing really?
    • patcon 7y ago
      First off, thanks so so much for engaging. Truly grateful <3 From the FAQ[1]: > In the first year, GitHub will not charge any fees, so 100% of sponsorships will go to the sponsored developer. In the future, we may charge a nominal processing fee https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-github-sponsors#about-the-github-sponsors-matching-fund https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-github-sponsors#ab... And yes, money feels nice. But there are politics here that are real. The meaning of a sum of money is also wrapped up in the future that it creates. Decision-makers at GitHub aren't stupid, and so the future their money creates should be assumed to be the one they intended. If someone comes into a town with boatloads of outsider money, and set up shop next door to a critical local business, but selling at loss leader rates that burn money, with plans to bump up prices once the locals flail and weaken -- that's understood as anti-social and kinda asshole behaviour. It feels no different here. We shouldn't be applauding, despite the good deal. Money ain't free. We're being paid off to accept a future of collapsed possibilities. imho of course :)
• Legogris 7y ago
  For a decentralized alternative, see Gitcoin, currently used especially by projects in and around the Ethereum space: https://gitcoin.co/ https://gitcoin.co/
• pkamb 7y ago
  I'd still like a product for putting putting bounties on small individual scripts / functions / pieces of code. Kind of a payment system on top of Stack Overflow or Github Gists; less-so a competitor to Upwork. I don't want the overhead of "hiring a freelancer" to do the work. But I'd definitely pay a bounty if someone came in with the answer / script / extension / app that solved the problem. previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14554542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14554542
• cosmodisk 7y ago
  I very much doubt it will work..for the devs..Developers are a special category of people,who like to earn a lot at their day job,yet tirelessly praise open source and try their best not to pay for anything.The best example of this is vue.js,which is extremely popular and used by thousands of people.The creator and main contributor is accepting Patreon, corporate sponsorship and etc.Go on his Patreon account and see how much he's pulling in.If that's the money for one of the most popular projects in JS ecosystem, the rest of the guys will be making $100/month..
• TBF-RnD 7y ago
  Being a full time open source independent research in an extremely tight financial spot, due to my cursed idealism, what means of surival are there for someone who can't stop working on my obsession? I am an honest to God searcher of the truth, so I'd hate to turn this into a commercial project. Also getting a job would be a highway to a psychiatric hospital due to being overworked. Done that multiple times and wouldn't wish it upon my worst enemy, Anybody have experience on how to make this lifestyle work, or do I have to give up on my dreams and get into to the line as the rest? http://tbf-rnd.life http://tbf-rnd.life http://sigma.eruditenow.com http://sigma.eruditenow.com * had I been the kind of person who have enemies
• kradroy 7y ago
  I think this is a bad development. The allure of getting paid for something you do for free can be too great. This may lead to OSS devs, especially those who do the work for free now, expecting extrinsic reward for their work. Extrinsic reward for work that once provided intrinsic reward can lead to cessation of that work, if the external reward lessens or goes away. A new type of dev may emerge from this who won't have the same values as the ones who do it free of charge. I can see this support feature changing things, but it won't in the way you suspect it will.
  • zachguo 7y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect
• craftoman 7y ago
  That's how Microsoft plans to monetize GitHub? Not bad....
• sequoia 7y ago
  Geez... it must be hard for other payment processors to compete with Github/MSFT's "give away free money" offering. :/ I guess all is fair in love & war (and Uber does the same, losing money to kill competition) but this sort of behaviour sure seems innovation-killing and massively entrenched-big-corp-player-favouring. This seems to go beyond killing competitors by offering their product for free, because in this case they're actually paying users cash to use their platform.
• ssn 7y ago
  Contributing to open source software has never been about money. I would be very interested in reading the economical analysis of the impact of this move by GitHub. How will the money incentive align with the existing incentives.
• miki123211 7y ago
  Anyone has any idea how thiswill work for EU residents? Will we be paying the outrageous US 30% tax and local taxes too?
  • anticensor 7y ago
    Double taxation prevention treaties will do their jobs. US should have one with EU.
• dredmorbius 7y ago
  Joey Hess raises questions: "What I would ask my lawyers about the new Github TOS' If I were looking over the TOS with my lawyers, I'd ask these questions... 4 License Grant to Us This seems to be saying that I'm granting an additional license to my software to Github. Is that right or does "license grant" have some other legal meaning? If the Free Software license I've already licensed my software under allows for everything in this "License Grant to Us", would that be sufficient, or would my software still be licenced under two different licences? There are violations of the GPL that can revoke someone's access to software under that license. Suppose that Github took such an action with my software, and their GPL license was revoked. Would they still have a license to my software under this "License Grant to Us" or not?.... http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/what_I_would_ask_my_lawyers_about_the_new_Github_TOS/ http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/what_I_would_ask_my_lawyers_abo...
• wincent 7y ago
  Is there any way I could add a button to my projects that would route "sponsorship" to a charity? Because I have a full time job, I do open source for fun, and I want to keep it that way — taking sponsorship would make that harder. But it would feel great to know that anything people wanted to put in the tip jar went straight to a non-profit. Edit: answering my own question, their help page — https://help.github.com/en/articles/displaying-a-sponsor-button-in-your-repository https://help.github.com/en/articles/displaying-a-sponsor-but... — says "We don’t support the use of funding links for other purposes, such as for advertising, or supporting political, community, or charity groups."
• wonjohnchoi 7y ago
  > To boost community funding, we'll match contributions up to $5,000 during a developer’s first year in GitHub Sponsors with the GitHub Sponsors Matching Fund. How will GitHub deal with bad actors who might create a project and donate $5,000 to himself to get free money?
• bluefox 7y ago
  Prior to sponsors, you developed that project for the fun of it. It was useful to some, so you gave this sponsorship thing a try. It was a success, maybe not a great success, but still. Now that you have sponsors, you feel somewhat obligated, but still not on the level of that "professional software industry" that destroyed so much about programming for you. Time passes, and at some point it becomes clear that sponsors don't have infinite resources, and at some point some of them take their money and leave. It lingers in the back of your head, but you continue development. You notice however, that your motivation lessens, especially for that particular project people care about. You decide that you want to move on. Many of the remaining sponsors don't take it well and back away. Now you feel that there's no point to even work on something else. Your soft income is nil. You remember the days you worked that software job. Back then, you managed to write a bit of code, push to a GitHub public repository, and be content that programming was not just a profession to you. Now, you don't even have that. You look around. There are sponsored celebrities, political cases where sponsors withdrew en-masse because of some controversy, and the usual monetary disputes. Having GitHub sponsors has become yet another status signal for potential employers or clients, and it's another a standard goodie to have them, by contract, transfer a small sum that way every month. Sickened, you turn back to your own issues. You decide not to let Microsoft poke bytes in your Incentive Unit that way. An optimist, you assure yourself that in a few months you'll repair yourself and be able to write some code again, this time Free Software, since you well know what Open Source means, what it always meant. The GitHub demon is no longer an option. No big deal, since it's also become more like a "social network for developers" with status lines and people using their legal names and professionalism all over it. GitLab still requires JavaScript to view source code, so that's DOA, what with you having your default browser running with JavaScript disabled (the Internet went to shit a long time ago). So you consider setting up some private GitHub-like that's actually accessible on your own server, or maybe use that FSF hosting site. You learned your lesson, but the software world took yet another step towards the void.
  • _bxg1 7y ago
    This... seems pessimistic and overly dramatized.
• Androider 7y ago
  This is a nice start for allowing sending "coffee money" between persons. If however you want to drive Serious Money into actually funding OSS projects please remember this: While virtually no company has a donations budget, almost every company has a $$$ marketing budget. Please let me give you some of that money that would otherwise be spent on blue pens with logos and endless display ads to GitHub projects. I'd be happy to drive $xxK/mo to open source projects my company depends on or that are simply being used by an audience that aligns with our own. To sell that internally, I need (as in, I would be laughed out of the room to propose it without): - My sponsoring company logo on the GitHub project page - UTM links and all that jazz to attribute traffic and campaigns to the specific projects that we sponsor See https://webpack.js.org/ https://webpack.js.org/ for a good example of a successful sponsorship program. Literally the biggest hurdle remaining for BigCorp to sponsor something like Webpack today is selling your boss on "Patreon" and "OpenCollective". But if you just increase our GitHub budget by a few K/month, AND the marketers get attributable traffic to boot that we can point to, well that's an easy sell!
  • ladon86 7y ago
    This is a good idea, but also the behavior will probably be emergent with the introduction of this feature - I can definitely see OSS maintainers offering logos/links in the README in exchange for monthly sponsorship. I bet we'll see the emergence of "Gold/Silver/Bronze" tiers too, just like at conferences.
    • oakesm9 7y ago
      Take a look at the Webpack page that GP mentioned. This is already happening
      • phil21 7y ago
        This has been happening since at least the late 90's when I started to get involved in open source. Heck, I've sponsored a number of projects back then as a teenager with a fledgling Internet business - with the express purpose of advertising to highly technical users I wanted to potentially sell to. I'm not sure if it was terribly effective at sales marketing, but it was highly effective at marketing towards the types of employees I wanted to work with. I see sponsoring open source projects as more of a recruitment thing than sales thing these days.
• AceJohnny2 7y ago
  Dan Ariely's 2008 book "Predictably Irrational" [1], which presents experiments in behavioral economics, has one chapter [2] that discusses the introduction of money ("market norms") in an otherwise money-free social context, typically of favors being exchanged ("social norms") To summarize, the introduction of hard currency completely disrupts the social dynamics and the resulting work quality, usually for the worst. You can find an more in-depth summary in the links: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictably_Irrational https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictably_Irrational [2] http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/w/page/14422685/Predictably%20Irrational http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/w/page/14422685/Predictably%... "Chapter 4: The Cost of Social Norms"
  • nicpottier 7y ago
    I mean yes, this is obviously a thing, no argument. But I'm not sure that means that Open Source maintainers are feeding themselves off the goodwill and feelgoodness they are getting from maintaining these projects. I would gander to guess that most maintainers are supported by a small minority of enterprisy agreements they have, either through large sponsorship or by working for a company that is supporting their Open Source work. And I think that's a bad thing. I would much rather see them supported by 10,000 $1 monthly donations than 5, $2,000 donations. That is more likely to lead to features and attention focused on the needs of the masses than the enterprise. I say this as someone who maintains an Open Source platform primarily funded by a single enterprise. I would love to flip that on its head.
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• andrewstuart 7y ago
  Sponsorships and donations don't work in any substantial way because they are optional. What might work is "KeepAlive" subscriptions, where companies pay substantive amount of money monthly to keep projects that they depend on alive. KeepAlive payments are about corporate self interest - ensuring that the projects they depend on aren't abandoned. The secret to success is naming. Calling it "KeepAlive" subscriptions conveys the self interest, and connects the potential death of the project to your need for it to be healthy because you've built it into your systems. Naming payments to open source projects as "Sponsorships" or "Donations" leads to the expected outcome - a trivial trickle of money. The payment amounts must be predefined and set high too - $200 - $500/month for small businesses $500-$5000 / month for medium and large business. It's critically important not to leave the amount to the "purchaser" - that's when you get payments of $1/month which is what happens on Patreon.
• EGreg 7y ago
  Interesting alternative to... Anyone remember how cryptocurrency was going to be the way to pay for open source projects? By which I mean buying the kickstarter-like tokens of the project and trading them on markets, speculating until it launches?
• nullc 7y ago
  Many projects that have had contributor sponsorship efforts in the past have had negative experiences with it, due to contributors showing up motivated by farming the payments with minimal investment. In my experience sponsorship that isn't at a level that can sustain a developer at least at an ongoing significant part time level often ends up being toxic-- pulling in the worst outcomes from funding it (changing motivations to being dollar driven, bringing in low effort farming contributions) without bringing most of the positive outcomes. I really hope that this is handled carefully.
• miguelmota 7y ago
  Very cool, this feature was much needed. It would be nice to be able to sponsor specific issues that pay bounties once the pull request is merged and issue is closed instead of only a specific developer. Would also be cool if the developer can specify a preferred payment option other than fiat such as open to accepting cryptocurrencies
• reilly3000 7y ago
  Here's when MSFT gets to throw their weight around. GitLab simply could not afford to match this program, and I doubt Atlassian could as well. In a year Microsoft will have won so much share of OSS that this will pay for itself many, many times over in the years to come.
• rewq4321 7y ago
  I get that some people are concerned about github strengthening its monopoly here, but that shouldn't be solved by preventing or opposing the improvement of the platform. There's a sense in which it's like opposing Tesla improving its autopilot tech because it further entrenches them as the leader in the electric car market - or whatever - you get the idea. Monopolies can lead to very bad outcomes for society, but we probably need to handle that by some means other than attacking improvements to the platform. This comment of course assumes that you think that it is actually an improvement. It does seem like there is a risk of hurting the "spirit" of open source, but then you'd have to hold the position that things like librepay/opencollective/patreon are bad for open source, which at least makes the claim a little dubious. I don't have strong predictions here, but if I had to gamble I'd say that lowing the friction to rewarding content producers (of any sort) is going to be a good think more often than not.
• 55555 7y ago
  One of the people promoted on this page is not like the others. Two projects, essentially zero work done (one is literally a single line in a readme file, the other a basic html page with a list of words), and yet already asking people for $100 per month to support her. Everyone else put in the work first. smh
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