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This seems like it's needed and (dareisay) overdue? Integrating sponsorship subscriptions into the core experience is sure to increase payments, a la twitch su

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
    Please don't break the site guidelines by making insinuations about astroturfing or shillage. It's a toxic trope that people bring up as cheap ammunition in arguments, and unless you have something approaching real evidence, it's off topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- kristianc 7y ago
  And yet the open alternatives don’t seem to have amounted to anyone making a living from open source. Centralizing it offers a nicer UX - it’s not just about feature parity.
  - diggan 7y ago
    So, for me that indicates that the problem is not that there is any service for making payments, but rather that open source developers who lives on donations, needs to be paid more by more people. It would be cool if GitHub integrated with existing platforms and helped that to happen. Instead, they signal nothing about this problem and shipped yet-another platform. They could have easily have contributed to solving the problem for real, but instead go their own way.
    - EugeneOZ 7y ago
      Money movements are not just calls to some external API - there's a lot of legal regulations around money movements.
    - kristianc 7y ago
      From GH’s perspective, why would they create a dependency on an open service (that could disappear at any moment) when they could roll their own? Especially with all the trust issues that come around payments. Are there any guarantees that Liberapay could even handle an integration at GH scale without it falling over? They opened 900 accounts last month. GitHub’s promise is something akin to ‘it just works’ - which means that they take care of this stuff rather than give you yet another tool to integrate with. GH can’t win in this scenario with some people. GH invest in Liberapay, give it a coat of paint, these same people will then complain that Liberapay has ‘sold out’ / gone ‘too enterprise’ (see Chef, Docker) (or the Microsoft variant - Oh noes, MSFT is working with open source tech it must be EEE) and demand that GH integrate with the next half-baked service with a Bootstrap website.
      - diggan 7y ago
        > why would they create a dependency on an open service (that could disappear at any moment) when they could roll their own? Because by creating the dependency on an open service and collaborating with them, they help them survive long term and to not disappear at any moment. Yes, it's nice that "it just works" but sometimes the easiest way of doing something doesn't mean it's the right way. Especially when it comes to hard things like "How do we ensure open source developers can get paid?"
- Kalium 7y ago
  > Seems what they are planning to offer is not better nor different than what others already are providing (see OpenCollective or LiberaPay). It's got a major company with deep and signficant expertise in security, payments, and accouting. A name that people and companies already trust with a raft of compliance all handled already. It might just be me, but if I were to speculate I would guess that OpenCollective and LiberaPay can't quite claim the same. I know that if I want to, I can get a SOC 2 report from GitHub. These are nor minor administrative details to be brushed aside idly. They matter, particularly to a company keen to ensure that they never have to apologize for a partner fucking up credit card handling or to someone with a corporate card who has to be careful how they use it. These things are major features.
  - diggan 7y ago
    I guess our perspectives are different. You seem to see this from GitHubs point of view, I'm seeing it from the view of open source developers. Both perspectives are equally valuable.
    - Kalium 7y ago
      I agree that our perspectives are different. I see this from the perspective of someone who wants to see developers get paid. Safely and securely, in a way that makes it easy for them to get paid the next time too. I'm also looking at this from the angle of "What non-nefarious reasons would GitHub have for making these decisions?". One of the first that sprang to mind is credit card security, which touches on quite a few issues at once. Further, my experience is that most of the time decisions that can be interpreted as being done for nefarious reasons were rarely actually made that way. I am willing to extend the HN-guideline principle of charity to GitHub, especially because I can see clear, real, valid reasons for standing up their own service over a partnership with a third-party service. I understand that some people will find these unconvincing or decide they are just a ploy. I haven't even touched on AML or KYC issues! You are definitely right about the importance of infrastructure made entirely of open source software. My perspective is, in essence, that there are other features that matter that may not fully live in code.
- EugeneOZ 7y ago
  More options is better in this case.
- michaelt 7y ago
  The Patreon product is 10% payment processing and 90% the marketing/branding/placement/ease-of-use/trust/normalisation, or whatever it is that makes people open their wallets. If GitHub Sponsors is stronger at whatever-it-is-that-makes-people-donate, that would be their advantage.
  - diggan 7y ago
    That's the scary part! OpenCollective for example, being developed via their own platform, need to make sure the platform is sustainable, and can't just throw cash wherever they want to gain marketshare. The result is a sustainable funding platform that will survive for as long as people fund it. GitHub on the other hand, can develop the wrong features, spend too much, give cash away and a whole bunch of other things, while not actually achieving sustainability in itself in the long-term. Microsoft will cover all of this, until they wont.
    - briandear 7y ago
      I have never heard of OpenCollective, but I have been using Github for 10 years. And “collective” in the name scares me because it makes me feel like it’s a bunch of street artists squatting in a warehouse in Oakland — perhaps fun and nice people, but not the type of people I’d want to trust with distributing money and compliance.
    - AYBABTME 7y ago
      But GH in this space will mean OSS developers will start to get paid for real, the phenomenon will grow and become standard and expected, and if GH stops doing it, the need for it will be so clear and people's expectation of having such a product so strong, that any drop in replacement service will instantly convert most users to their platform. GH right now is growing the market by bringing millions of eyes onto this problem. The same as Patreon did. And if Patreon dies today, do you think no one will bring up an alternative? And that supporters won't transition with creators to that platform? It's the same idea as Paypal creating and growing the e-payment system. Down the line, the market of e-payment has grown enough and is legitimized enough that if Paypal was to stop service, there'd be plenty of alternatives, and people are already using plenty of alternatives. OpenCollective and the likes haven't been growing this market the way GH will be doing, and the result is only a net positive for OSS and developers.
- wooger 7y ago
  Yeah, but they are Github, so they will clearly win out over those companies I’ve never heard of. Everyone with a big report for your OSS project is already on your Github page. Its perfect.
stockkid 7y ago
> Does this hurt FOSS contributions, because now people start to expect to be paid rather than doing it for inherent motivations? I think having donatiom payments integrated with the platform will shift the motivation of programmers from intrinsic to extrinsic one. The design seems to show a call to action to 'sponsor' right in the github profile. That's a big emphasis. Will such shift 'hurt' the FOSS contribution? I'm not sure because the answer depends what we mean by 'hurt'. But I fear that it's not going to be quite the same.
- Drdrdrq 7y ago
  Interesting. I agree that it's not going to be the same, but I welcome that. Currently open source is just a tool for big tech to advance their agenda. I think this is a brilliant move from MS. They gain goodwill and at the same time help shift expectations of OSS developers towards being paid for work. Given that both of Azure rivals are using FOSS extensively, while MS is not (much?), this could help weaken the rivals. The reason I welcome this is that too often OSS is simply not good enough and would be (imho) much better if developers were paid for their work.
- imtringued 7y ago
  It wouldn't surprise me if maintainers suddenly start ignoring issues from non-sponsors because they can't handle all of them.
scriptsmith 7y ago
> 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? I'd also be concerned about features being implemented because there's money behind it, forgoing more important technical reasons. Of course there are many projects that already implement this 'quid pro quo' development strategy, and open source projects with big corporate backers. How do these projects currently handle monetary influence in their decision making?
Kirth 7y ago
> Do companies use GitHub sponsorships to judge the health of dependencies? Will they create budgets to support their dependencies systematically? In my past I've worked with multiple places that absolutely loved open-source. Because to them it was "free". Something they could use in their products and then charge customers for. Often these opportunistic parasites would never contribute anything back; going out of their way to work around missing features or bugs rather than trying to fix or contribute towards the codebase. I doubt that these companies now, despite depending on such OS, would pay paying money/contribute; no matter how administratively trivial it became.
- RandallBrown 7y ago
  I've also worked at multiple companies where they were afraid of open source because the project might be abandoned. They would happily pay thousands for a closed source dependency because they could guarantee it would be supported. This could offer a nice medium where a company can be pretty sure that it will stick around (based on funding) and contribute to make sure that it does.
  - snowwrestler 7y ago
    I like open source software projects and use them extensively on behalf of my employer. I care that they are healthy. That said, there is a huge difference between getting authorization to spend company money on a subscription or support contract (easy), vs. getting authorization to donate company money to a person, informal group or nonprofit (extremely difficult). A license or support contract is easy for the lawyers to understand, easy for procurement to understand, easy for finance to understand. That's how work gets done at a corporation, and they do those types of deals all day. Depending on the amount, I can sometimes turn around approval in hours. A donation is not "how work gets done". It has no strings attached, which looks scary to lawyers and finance and PR folks. In my company at least, donations have a separate approval path that loops in the PR and corporate citizenship folks... and they want to see that money go to something fuzzy and feel good, like a charity. "Donations" is a line in the budget; it's not a big one and it's not mine. So, I still think that the way forward for open source projects who want financial support from companies is to organize somehow (incorporate, nonprofit, etc) and sell support subscriptions. This aligns very well with how the corporation manages other dependencies, like office space, phone service, etc.
cush 7y ago
> If maintainers can see who donated, do they prioritize issues / pull requests? (I think that could be a good thing actually). This is one step away from consumers being able to put bug bounties on issues too
_bxg1 7y ago
> If maintainers can see who donated, do they prioritize issues / pull requests? (I think that could be a good thing actually). This actually seems like it would be terrible. Contributions should be evaluated on merit, not on bribes. The overall concept seemed good at first but you raised some real concerns.
- ehsankia 7y ago
  How so? If anything, it would be cool to have issue bounties to put your money to get the stuff you want solved.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    For the same reason lobbying is harmful. The many should be served, not just those who can pay.
- cheerlessbog 7y ago
  Sometimes fine PR'S just sit without review or merging because the maintainer is busy with their life. If some money rewards them to look, great.

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
  Please don't break the site guidelines by making insinuations about astroturfing or shillage. It's a toxic trope that people bring up as cheap ammunition in arguments, and unless you have something approaching real evidence, it's off topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
kristianc 7y ago
And yet the open alternatives don’t seem to have amounted to anyone making a living from open source. Centralizing it offers a nicer UX - it’s not just about feature parity.
- diggan 7y ago
  So, for me that indicates that the problem is not that there is any service for making payments, but rather that open source developers who lives on donations, needs to be paid more by more people. It would be cool if GitHub integrated with existing platforms and helped that to happen. Instead, they signal nothing about this problem and shipped yet-another platform. They could have easily have contributed to solving the problem for real, but instead go their own way.
  - EugeneOZ 7y ago
    Money movements are not just calls to some external API - there's a lot of legal regulations around money movements.
  - kristianc 7y ago
    From GH’s perspective, why would they create a dependency on an open service (that could disappear at any moment) when they could roll their own? Especially with all the trust issues that come around payments. Are there any guarantees that Liberapay could even handle an integration at GH scale without it falling over? They opened 900 accounts last month. GitHub’s promise is something akin to ‘it just works’ - which means that they take care of this stuff rather than give you yet another tool to integrate with. GH can’t win in this scenario with some people. GH invest in Liberapay, give it a coat of paint, these same people will then complain that Liberapay has ‘sold out’ / gone ‘too enterprise’ (see Chef, Docker) (or the Microsoft variant - Oh noes, MSFT is working with open source tech it must be EEE) and demand that GH integrate with the next half-baked service with a Bootstrap website.
    - diggan 7y ago
      > why would they create a dependency on an open service (that could disappear at any moment) when they could roll their own? Because by creating the dependency on an open service and collaborating with them, they help them survive long term and to not disappear at any moment. Yes, it's nice that "it just works" but sometimes the easiest way of doing something doesn't mean it's the right way. Especially when it comes to hard things like "How do we ensure open source developers can get paid?"
Kalium 7y ago
> Seems what they are planning to offer is not better nor different than what others already are providing (see OpenCollective or LiberaPay). It's got a major company with deep and signficant expertise in security, payments, and accouting. A name that people and companies already trust with a raft of compliance all handled already. It might just be me, but if I were to speculate I would guess that OpenCollective and LiberaPay can't quite claim the same. I know that if I want to, I can get a SOC 2 report from GitHub. These are nor minor administrative details to be brushed aside idly. They matter, particularly to a company keen to ensure that they never have to apologize for a partner fucking up credit card handling or to someone with a corporate card who has to be careful how they use it. These things are major features.
- diggan 7y ago
  I guess our perspectives are different. You seem to see this from GitHubs point of view, I'm seeing it from the view of open source developers. Both perspectives are equally valuable.
  - Kalium 7y ago
    I agree that our perspectives are different. I see this from the perspective of someone who wants to see developers get paid. Safely and securely, in a way that makes it easy for them to get paid the next time too. I'm also looking at this from the angle of "What non-nefarious reasons would GitHub have for making these decisions?". One of the first that sprang to mind is credit card security, which touches on quite a few issues at once. Further, my experience is that most of the time decisions that can be interpreted as being done for nefarious reasons were rarely actually made that way. I am willing to extend the HN-guideline principle of charity to GitHub, especially because I can see clear, real, valid reasons for standing up their own service over a partnership with a third-party service. I understand that some people will find these unconvincing or decide they are just a ploy. I haven't even touched on AML or KYC issues! You are definitely right about the importance of infrastructure made entirely of open source software. My perspective is, in essence, that there are other features that matter that may not fully live in code.
EugeneOZ 7y ago
More options is better in this case.
michaelt 7y ago
The Patreon product is 10% payment processing and 90% the marketing/branding/placement/ease-of-use/trust/normalisation, or whatever it is that makes people open their wallets. If GitHub Sponsors is stronger at whatever-it-is-that-makes-people-donate, that would be their advantage.
- diggan 7y ago
  That's the scary part! OpenCollective for example, being developed via their own platform, need to make sure the platform is sustainable, and can't just throw cash wherever they want to gain marketshare. The result is a sustainable funding platform that will survive for as long as people fund it. GitHub on the other hand, can develop the wrong features, spend too much, give cash away and a whole bunch of other things, while not actually achieving sustainability in itself in the long-term. Microsoft will cover all of this, until they wont.
  - briandear 7y ago
    I have never heard of OpenCollective, but I have been using Github for 10 years. And “collective” in the name scares me because it makes me feel like it’s a bunch of street artists squatting in a warehouse in Oakland — perhaps fun and nice people, but not the type of people I’d want to trust with distributing money and compliance.
  - AYBABTME 7y ago
    But GH in this space will mean OSS developers will start to get paid for real, the phenomenon will grow and become standard and expected, and if GH stops doing it, the need for it will be so clear and people's expectation of having such a product so strong, that any drop in replacement service will instantly convert most users to their platform. GH right now is growing the market by bringing millions of eyes onto this problem. The same as Patreon did. And if Patreon dies today, do you think no one will bring up an alternative? And that supporters won't transition with creators to that platform? It's the same idea as Paypal creating and growing the e-payment system. Down the line, the market of e-payment has grown enough and is legitimized enough that if Paypal was to stop service, there'd be plenty of alternatives, and people are already using plenty of alternatives. OpenCollective and the likes haven't been growing this market the way GH will be doing, and the result is only a net positive for OSS and developers.
wooger 7y ago
Yeah, but they are Github, so they will clearly win out over those companies I’ve never heard of. Everyone with a big report for your OSS project is already on your Github page. Its perfect.

stockkid 7y ago

> Does this hurt FOSS contributions, because now people start to expect to be paid rather than doing it for inherent motivations? I think having donatiom payments integrated with the platform will shift the motivation of programmers from intrinsic to extrinsic one. The design seems to show a call to action to 'sponsor' right in the github profile. That's a big emphasis. Will such shift 'hurt' the FOSS contribution? I'm not sure because the answer depends what we mean by 'hurt'. But I fear that it's not going to be quite the same.

Drdrdrq 7y ago
Interesting. I agree that it's not going to be the same, but I welcome that. Currently open source is just a tool for big tech to advance their agenda. I think this is a brilliant move from MS. They gain goodwill and at the same time help shift expectations of OSS developers towards being paid for work. Given that both of Azure rivals are using FOSS extensively, while MS is not (much?), this could help weaken the rivals. The reason I welcome this is that too often OSS is simply not good enough and would be (imho) much better if developers were paid for their work.
imtringued 7y ago
It wouldn't surprise me if maintainers suddenly start ignoring issues from non-sponsors because they can't handle all of them.

scriptsmith 7y ago

> 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? I'd also be concerned about features being implemented because there's money behind it, forgoing more important technical reasons. Of course there are many projects that already implement this 'quid pro quo' development strategy, and open source projects with big corporate backers. How do these projects currently handle monetary influence in their decision making?

Kirth 7y ago

> Do companies use GitHub sponsorships to judge the health of dependencies? Will they create budgets to support their dependencies systematically? In my past I've worked with multiple places that absolutely loved open-source. Because to them it was "free". Something they could use in their products and then charge customers for. Often these opportunistic parasites would never contribute anything back; going out of their way to work around missing features or bugs rather than trying to fix or contribute towards the codebase. I doubt that these companies now, despite depending on such OS, would pay paying money/contribute; no matter how administratively trivial it became.

RandallBrown 7y ago
I've also worked at multiple companies where they were afraid of open source because the project might be abandoned. They would happily pay thousands for a closed source dependency because they could guarantee it would be supported. This could offer a nice medium where a company can be pretty sure that it will stick around (based on funding) and contribute to make sure that it does.
- snowwrestler 7y ago
  I like open source software projects and use them extensively on behalf of my employer. I care that they are healthy. That said, there is a huge difference between getting authorization to spend company money on a subscription or support contract (easy), vs. getting authorization to donate company money to a person, informal group or nonprofit (extremely difficult). A license or support contract is easy for the lawyers to understand, easy for procurement to understand, easy for finance to understand. That's how work gets done at a corporation, and they do those types of deals all day. Depending on the amount, I can sometimes turn around approval in hours. A donation is not "how work gets done". It has no strings attached, which looks scary to lawyers and finance and PR folks. In my company at least, donations have a separate approval path that loops in the PR and corporate citizenship folks... and they want to see that money go to something fuzzy and feel good, like a charity. "Donations" is a line in the budget; it's not a big one and it's not mine. So, I still think that the way forward for open source projects who want financial support from companies is to organize somehow (incorporate, nonprofit, etc) and sell support subscriptions. This aligns very well with how the corporation manages other dependencies, like office space, phone service, etc.

cush 7y ago

> If maintainers can see who donated, do they prioritize issues / pull requests? (I think that could be a good thing actually). This is one step away from consumers being able to put bug bounties on issues too

_bxg1 7y ago

> If maintainers can see who donated, do they prioritize issues / pull requests? (I think that could be a good thing actually). This actually seems like it would be terrible. Contributions should be evaluated on merit, not on bribes. The overall concept seemed good at first but you raised some real concerns.

ehsankia 7y ago
How so? If anything, it would be cool to have issue bounties to put your money to get the stuff you want solved.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  For the same reason lobbying is harmful. The many should be served, not just those who can pay.
cheerlessbog 7y ago
Sometimes fine PR'S just sit without review or merging because the maintainer is busy with their life. If some money rewards them to look, great.