18 ms·

Thank you to our maintainers

193 points by johnny_reilly 4y ago

Gentil 4y ago
Onion headline: Billionaire pays 500k to charity instead of paying $5 million dollars in tax! Context - Github copilot license violations.
encryptluks2 4y ago
I wonder if this is evenly distributed? $500,000 may seem like a lot but that comes out to about $500 per maintainer. This doesn't appear to be an ongoing subscription either. I personally would rather Microsoft keep the money and spend it on open sourcing their own products instead of trying to find more ways to exploit others.
- rglullis 4y ago
  Whynotboth.jpg?
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    Because Microsoft is incapable of doing both. They will keep taking more than they give back. I'd rather have someone keep $500 than give it to me so they can go around and brag about it and then later find out they've been using my stuff without my permission because they felt like I owed it to them.
    - rglullis 4y ago
      If your work is FOSS, they don't "owe" you anything, just like you don't owe anything to them if they decide to support you. And, yes, $500k is relatively nothing for them. But I don't see how "relatively" nothing is better than actually nothing.
      - fnord123 4y ago
        The context of reselling code is copilot which is of questionable legality. They owe you a copyright header when distributing your BSD or MIT licensed code. They owe you adhering to the GPL license when distributing your GPL licensed code.
        rglullis 4y ago
        That is a separate issue, and unless they think that money would be enough to settle any license violations, it has nothing to do with donating some cash to maintainers.
        fnord123 4y ago
        It's not a separate issue. It's the issue GP was referring to.
        encryptluks2 4y ago
        That is exactly what I was referring to. I wonder if some people are just unfamiliar with copilot licensing issues or they don't see how that is an issue.
        rglullis 4y ago
        Of course the Copilot thing is problematic and they should not let be off the hook for it, but Copilot is not even referenced in the blog post. My read is that they are giving the money to projects they use to develop GitHub itself. And if this has nothing to do with the Copilot issue, why bring it to the conversation?
    - jrochkind1 4y ago
      Why are you contributing to open source projects if you don't want people to be able to use your contributions without your permission? You seem to be making a mistake.
- numbsafari 4y ago
  Microsoft had over $61 Billion in net income in FY2021. This is 0.0008% of that. They should probably be paying more, not less.
  - drstewart 4y ago
    Yep. It's like Bainbridge Health, spun out of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia which had $3 BILLION in revenue in FY2021 and $10 BILLION in assets. How much did Bainbridge Health give to open source health platforms? Hopefully at least .001% of those amounts.
    - numbsafari 4y ago
      You are comparing revenue to earnings, for one thing. MSFT FY21 Revenue was $168 Billion. They also report having $350 Billion in assets.
- qubyte 4y ago
  I got $550 so I think it's split evenly (they state it's shared between 900 folk in the blog post, which I assume is rounded). It's a one off as you say. Even if they do this next year, this event will have prompted a lot of folk to set up sponsors, so we'd all get a smaller cut.
  - morelisp 4y ago
    > this event will have prompted a lot of folk to set up sponsors Shh, you're not supposed to explain the trick.
JulianWasTaken 4y ago
I got $550 from this yesterday (as did a few others I asked, so I think the dollar amount was the same for everyone). Not life changing but certainly always a nice way to start the day, with some unexpected $$.
- Fnoord 4y ago
  This is a PR stunt, but that does not mean we should not be allowed to appreciate it. The impact is going to differ per country. For example, 550 USD might not be much for an average American programmer but for an average Ukrainian or Indian (the latter has a heart connected to) its a whole lot more. I also suppose Russian devs are out of luck.
  - fnord123 4y ago
    They are literally paying people to stay on GitHub instead of moving to gitlab. Reminds me of their OEM deals. Microsoft never changes.
    - rglullis 4y ago
      Do you have any other alternative for FOSS developers to get funding? Is Google paying anything? Do they still do GSOC? What about Apple? I mean, of course MS is not donating out of pure altruism. But so what?
      - rsstack 4y ago
        Google's GSoC is still happening every year.
        rglullis 4y ago
        Good, but it is still not an alternative for funding open source maintainers.
        4y ago
hellerve 4y ago
I’m of two minds about this: - On the one hand, for GitHub, 500k is nothing, just a PR move. For maintainers, $500 might make the difference between struggling to pay rent and having enough money to leave it in the bank, or having a nice dinner at the end of the month. - On the other hand, for GitHub, 500k is nothing, just a PR move! If they really wanted to show appreciation for the maintainers that power a billion dollar business, more than a drop in the bucket would be great. So, I guess it boils down to: that’s a great start, don’t stop there!
- OJFord 4y ago
  Yeah as soon as I got to 'who are also signed up with GitHub Sponsors' I thought 'hmm, this came out of the marketing budget didn't it'. Which is nice for the recipients of course, but otherwise is what it is.
  - masukomi 4y ago
    i would bet good money that GitHub controls a non-profit whose purpose is to give money to open source devs. Otherwise every donation to a sponsor would be a loss because they're passing on 100% of the money†. If, however, they're giving the money to a non-profit then it's all a tax write-off for them. † yeah, yeah, soon they'll be charging 10% to companies who sponsor, but I'm betting us little folks donating are cumulatively at least a million dollars and they probably don't want to loose hundred thousand when they could have a tax credit for it.
    - weird-eye-issue 4y ago
      That's not how basic accounting and taxes works You don't pay taxes on revenue, you pay it on profit. If they pay out all the revenue they owe taxes on $0
- amelius 4y ago
  We need funding of OS projects like how science is funded. Letting a company do it is not a good idea. Not saying that science funding is perfect.
oefrha 4y ago
No good deed goes unpunished. They didn’t have to do this, and now that they did, not surprisingly people (who probably aren’t even the recipients) are complaining that the amount is too tiny, the donation isn’t ongoing, etc. Wouldn’t it be nice if the complainers’ employers paid a tiny, one time $550 to open source projects they depend on.
- blagie 4y ago
  I usually don't consider something to be a good deed if more money is spent promoting the deed than cost of the deed. That's kind of my threshold. I often see that a corporation spends e.g. $1M on a marketing blitz about a $50,000 donation, or runs some campaign where consumers need to do something for some very nominal donation somewhere. The cynic in me also looks at this as a bribe. Someone who got a $500 gift is much more likely to stay on github. Do that for the top 1000 projects, and you've stemmed the flow to gitlab. The cynic in me became a lot more cynical when github started selling my own code back to me with copilot.
  - oefrha 4y ago
    To companies using my open source projects: please donate $550 then go on a $1m marketing blitz telling everyone about it. I don’t care how you spend your money outside your donation. Now, this is a pseudonymous account so you obviously don’t know whether you use my projects. Just donate to whatever you use. To expand: I see grandstanding all the time. I see precious little money flowing into my PayPal tip jar. Casual users of my completely free web services have been a lot more generous than companies/developers using my open source libraries/tools. I’m completely fine with the lack of donations, but that certainly makes all the grandstanding from stingy people who don’t give a dime very annoying.
    - infinitezest 4y ago
      How do you know the people that are grandstanding are the same people that are stingy?
      - 4y ago
mnd999 4y ago
Thanks for training our model folks. We’re gonna charge $10 a month for your work but hey, here’s a one off $550
dotancohen 4y ago
> From the U.S. to Japan to Brazil, if you’re one of the people or projects we identified > then you will get a confirmation about the sponsorship before the end of June. How will this work for the Japanese? I've tried donating to Anki, maintained by someone in Japan, and it seems that accepting donations there is so problematic that he actually prefers just not to accept them.
captn3m0 4y ago
Wondering how they are counting dependencies. GitHub’s current dependency tooling (Dependabit, Dependency Graph) ignores Dockerfiles for eg, and anything installed on the OS level is not easily accounted either.
onlydnaq 4y ago
Something about that headline really irks me. I think GitHub is an amazing place for people to share code, I also think it’s really nice of them to do this. But the maintainers aren’t “their” maintainers. They are maintainers using GitHub for their projects. Probably just me overreacting, just thought I’d mention it.
- Huggernaut 4y ago
  I believe they are maintainers of the dependencies that GitHub uses.
- throwaway27727 4y ago
  They're referring to maintainers of projects that GitHub relies on for their own work, so calling them "our maintainers" isn't much of a linguistic stretch.
nl 4y ago
You can tell the people who neither run businesses or are open source maintainers. They are the ones complaining about both GitHub giving money to maintainers and spending money on marketing. To those people: there's no harm being done by this and there is good. That's how you judge something like this.
- heurisko 4y ago
  I wouldn't accept the money, because quantifying a altruistic/passionate/to scratch my itch act in terms of monetary value kills it. The same phenomenon applies to reluctance to remunerate blood donations. > Some studies in psychology and economics have found that material incentive discourages prosocial behaviors and causes decrease in blood supply. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2847338/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2847338/ I think the one-off donation to be completely tin-eared. They should offer to pay a salary to developers working on critical infrastructure, Jetbrains effectively did this with Nikita Popov, or leave open source alone. GitHub has shown they are naive regarding psychology around this area.
  - nl 4y ago
    Offering rewards in advance is not the same psychologically as receiving surprise rewards because of work already done. Also while I'm familiar with the debate around incentives for blood donations that particular paper you have cited is terrible. Notably they do a literature review where they find discussions about how it could theoretically undermine motivations, but don't address the counter-argument they mention themselves where they list example of rewards being used to successfully increase supply! They list studies where it both decreased and increased supply, which seems to indicate that the type of incentive and the conditions in which it was offered make a significant difference. They end up arguing that there are risks that incentivized donors come from groups of higher risk of infectious blood diseases. This may or may not true, but is a different argument to if incentives work.
beastman82 4y ago
The reason everyone's so cynical about this is because Copilot is literally selling this code and it reeks of public relations rather than charity.
- serial_dev 4y ago
  Yes, the timing of this really makes me think that it could be to divert attention from the negative press that copilot got. Having people talk about whether 500k is the right amount to donate for a gigantic company like Microsoft is much better than people discussing the ethics, legality, trustworthiness and pricing of copilot. Last week we talked about whether or not it is legal to use license x to train their AI or if they will secretly steal our proprietary code and accidentally leak it for everyone else to see. Today we talk about whether the nice gesture for maintainers are enough.
- nickjj 4y ago
  Yes and if I were to guess a lot of folks who are upset about copilot stealing and selling code don't have GitHub sponsors enabled so it feels not genuine. It reads more like "here's a friendly reminder that you can make money with open source as long as you enable GitHub sponsors which btw will make us money too[0]!". [0]: Organizations will have at least a 10% fee taken from GitHub once the beta is finished. There's also no guarantee that personal accounts will remain fee-less too, this could easily be "just another" spot where a company offers something for free for mass adoption and then charges for it later. In any case it's marketing for a feature that provides revenue to GitHub.
  - deleted 4y ago
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wly_cdgr 4y ago
buro9 4y ago
Hmmm... I never finished updating my Github Sponsor thing, so I've just done that. But as someone that tended to create orgs for projects rather than have it all under a personal account, should I move all of the projects? I guess so, right? What's the recommended way to move Go repos without breaking them for all users? (I have low-thousands of stars, but the largest project is used by mid-thousands of projects - so I anticipate breakage for my hopeful $5 one-off solo sponsor). Something like using a vanity import path for all projects? https://sagikazarmark.hu/blog/vanity-import-paths-in-go/ https://sagikazarmark.hu/blog/vanity-import-paths-in-go/
- cdrini 4y ago
  I'm not entirely sure, but I think if your personal account is marked as a maintainer for the repo, it doesn't matter if the repo is under its own org? I feel like most projects create org accounts, so would be kinda surprised if that wasn't supported somehow.
  - buro9 4y ago
    Yeah, but then I'd need to create and maintain a lot of org accounts.
    - cdrini 4y ago
      Hmm I'm not sure I understand. Here's what I'm assuming: You currently have some number of org repos; eg: my-project/my-project, foobar/foobar And you have your personal account: buro9. You use your personal account to commit and maintain those org repos. As long as you set your personal account as an admin/maintainer on those org repos, I think you get all the benefits you need? I don't think there's any benefit to moving eg my-project/my-project to buro9/my-project
- Latty 4y ago
  The .github/FUNDING.yml file in the repo determines who will be shown as people to sponsor, it's not related to the account or org that controls the repo.
deleted 4y ago
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hrdwdmrbl 4y ago
On the one hand, that's the salary of 2-5 engineers. Pure PR. On the other hand, it's more than $0.
frenkel 4y ago
Nice little gem I didn’t know about at the end of the article: https://github.com/sponsors/explore https://github.com/sponsors/explore
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  Cool! I'd love to be able to filter by language. My main work is not JS and my JS dependencies are kind of incidental to it, but JS repos dominate the listing for me, I guess just by how JS is so dependency prolific.
  - frenkel 4y ago
    Use the "ecosystem" filters in the sidebar (on desktop) or at the bottom (on mobile).
johnny_reilly 4y ago
I'm really disappointed with the conversation this has provoked. I was a fortunate recipient of this and I am delighted. I'm pleased about the money, that's great. But more than that I was really thrilled to discover that I had indirectly worked on GitHub; because I love GitHub. I feel like I should qualify this further. I actually missed the original email and spent a day or so realising friends and open source colleagues were being recognised, whilst believing my own OSS wasn't in the mix. And I was pleased for them. I've been doing OSS for more than a decade. I enjoy it. I wish companies directly supported it, as paying for what you value is responsible and wise. GitHub just did that. Thank you GitHub. I appreciate it. This was a good thing. Well done!
- fartcannon 4y ago
  - nicce 4y ago
    This is quite problematic area indeed. If developers are happy for receiving 500$ for decades of their work, what justifies paying more in the future? I guess everything is good and there is no need to change anything. I get it, that it is the idea of open source, but the demands are increasing towards authors while they just use their spare time in most of the cases. More of their work is used to generate money, but authors are receiving barely anything.
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    > There's a Radiohead lab episode about money the gov gives the families of the people it kills. Hey fartcannon, I think you're saying that GitHub surprising open source developers with cash gifts is analogous to governments compensating families for killing relatives. My only thought on this is: I hope that you're okay, and if you need help I hope you'll seek it. It's been a tough few years.
    - deleted 4y ago
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    - 4y ago
0des 4y ago
I lost respect for a lot of you today who had the nerve to suggest that these amounts aren't enough money. For the OSS contributions I've made, I've never been given a penny or even so much as a single coffee for the things I've created, but if someone did, it could be a nickel and I'm not going to say anything but thank you. Nobody owes you anything in this world, and a little grace goes a long way in this industry. For those of you who complained about the money, you people need to reflect on your attitudes and what brought you to this point. Ugly.
- selykg 4y ago
  Judge much? I’m not a maintainer but adjacent to the tech industry (Ed tech) and am hurting for money due to inflation, and I live in a low cost of living area. You don’t know everyone’s situation. Stop judging them.
  - vaylian 4y ago
    First of all: Everyone should have enough money to live a life in dignity. However, this is about public open source projects. You can earn money with those projects. But then you also have to clearly communicate this. Either by asking for donations, sponsorship or offer a support contract. Because the default model of open source is: Here is some code, here is the license, feel free to use it without going through a paywall first.
  - sidlls 4y ago
    There's a great way to work in software without hurting for money: stop giving away labor for free. I can and will judge them, especially the ones who complain about this money specifically because of their choices.
- fartcannon 4y ago
  What's ugly here is calling your peers names just to defend a huge corporations PR.
  - targafarian 4y ago
Caligatio 4y ago
I got the email on Friday telling me I'm one of the fortunate few to get $550 and cynically thought that it was some sort of GitHub credit; needless to say that I was pleasantly surprised that it was actual cash! I've been solo maintaining my project since 2008 and average about ~425,000 downloads/week per NPM. My sum total of donations prior to GitHub's was maybe $5. Making money on a JavaScript library was certainly never my goal but I sincerely appreciate the acknowledgement that my project has worth that someone is willing to pay for.
- fartcannon 4y ago
  Which library?
  - c0balt 4y ago
    Not op, but they probably refer to jsSHA[0]. (Based on author name of repo and package) [0]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/jssha https://www.npmjs.com/package/jssha
    - fartcannon 4y ago
      Thanks, might as well spread the word right?
    - Caligatio 4y ago
      Yep, that's me! It's a niche project (even more so when I started it to salt/hash passwords client side during the expensive SSL days) so it's almost never worth advertising :)
      - fartcannon 4y ago
        Maybe not glamorous, but definitely has worth (so many downloads!)
- andrew_ 4y ago
  same! I maintain a humble little lib used by prettier, etc and it receives 5.5 million weekly downloads. I've got a few more like that as well. They've never received a donation, and I have just a few monthly donors (to which I'm very grateful) so this was cool to see.
synu 4y ago
There’s something a little creepy about referring to the maintainers as “ours.”
- akerl_ 4y ago
  Why? They donated to projects that GitHub's code depends on. The person who brings me my mail is accurately referred to as "my mail person". Not because I somehow own them, but because they're the person who provides service to my home. Would you feel the same way if they'd said "We're adding new features for our users"?
  - synu 4y ago
    I think it’s because they are the maintainers of their projects, not maintainers of GitHub. So calling them GitHub’s maintainers sounds off, even if GitHub depends on their projects. It’s a weird application of the transitive property. I suspect the maintainers would definitely say they are a user of GitHub. Most would not say they are a maintainer of GitHub (at least I don’t think so).
    - akerl_ 4y ago
      They are both "maintainers who use GitHub's platform" and "maintainers of software GitHub depends on". "Our maintainers" is just as normal as "Our neighbor" or "Our users". To pick the most adverse example: GitHub could equally talk about Gitlab and say "Our competitor". They're clearly not saying Gitlab belongs to them or giving them some kind of connection that doesn't exist.
      - synu 4y ago
        Still sounds strange to me though I can understand your point. “One of our competitors” to me sounds the same as “one of our users”, and different from “one of our maintainers” when referring to someone who is not a maintainer of GitHub. It’s sounds more (to me) like calling someone else’s kids one of your children because they are visiting your house. Anyway, I can only imagine how uninteresting this conversation must be to anyone else :)
philliphaydon 4y ago
Does anyone know what `font-feature-settings` does? ProtonMail and GitHub both use this setting and it causes fonts to display weird in Firefox. Examples here: https://twitter.com/philliphaydon/status/1541021821637922816 https://twitter.com/philliphaydon/status/1541021821637922816
- lights0123 4y ago
  It changes different settings in the font. In GitHub's case, they use the font "Alliance No.1". ss02 doesn't appear to have a visible effect, but ss01 changes the letter a from a rounded body with a stem on top to a rounded body with a straight stem on the right. You may have custom fonts disabled—these feature settings do the right thing on GitHub's and ProtonMail's ("Arizona") fonts, but make your system fonts do weird things. Both sites appear just fine for me on Firefox on Linux.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    Ah. I forgot I turned that setting off years ago. I guess the Firefox account saves settings. Just need to figure out how to disable that css option. Thanks for the info!
fartcannon 4y ago
Divide et impera!
carapace 4y ago
On the one hand, hooray for half a million dollars for the hardworking folks "down in the trenches" who seldom receive the appreciation or remuneration they so richly deserve. Hoorah! On the other hand, this does nothing for me as a Free software fanatic to make Github and Microsoft any more palatable. I still can't believe that a closed, proprietary centralized webapp has so completely co-opted both the git DCVS and FOSS itself. (I've heard people unironically call Github the "flagship of the FOSS movement".) The image I get is of the boss riding by in a gilded carriage casting handfuls of gold coins to the serfs. Some of the comments here are of the "shut up and be grateful" ilk, and some even try to shame people for not being sufficiently grateful and/or uncritical. I call BS on that. If Github/MS find themselves in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation in re: supporting FOSS maintainers it's only because of their own actions and history. If they really wanted to thank FOSS folks they could open source Github, eh? Or Windows.
toastal 4y ago
Did anyone get $500 that didn't signup for GitHub's payment process or putting their non-standard `.github/` folder in your repository? This feels like a FOMO play to get more users to add GitHub mirrors to their project to try to dominate the Code forge space and tangential donations (which is why they did a loss-leading match program in the beta). I'd rather not prop that up; I'll stick to Sourcehut and Codeberg/Gitea.
- makeworld 4y ago
  As I understand it this is only for users who are part of the GitHub Sponsors program. I don't think the .github folder is relevant.
- HellsMaddy 4y ago
  Tangential: you don’t have to put a .github folder in every repository. You can create a .github repository and put files like FUNDING.yml in there, and they will take effect across all of your repos.
- rurban 4y ago
  How should they ship $500 to people of whom they don't have their bank account info?
  - toastal 4y ago
    Other people link their Liberapay, et. al. in the README. Many projects live outside of GitHub too that have links to donations on their sites.
  - account42 4y ago
    They could ask those users for bank account info or alternative payout methods?
smokey_circles 4y ago
I think it's pretty pathetic some of you are focused on copilot (as if youve never ripped code off SO before). I'm willing to bet none of you have contributed anything to open source either. Dunning-Kruger effect on full display. To the rest, congratulations and thank you from those of us who thanklessly use your hard work. I hope this kind of public appreciation takes off and we see more large names using this as a template.
- deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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goodpoint 4y ago
Downvote me to hell, but for-profit companies do not give donations in order to decrease their profit. Microsoft github might be doing this to retain projects that might be switching to non-corporate forges, or appease the concerns around copylot. Or expand "github Sponsors" and achieve even more control over the FOSS community. Beware of strangers bearing gifts.
dmix 4y ago
Is there a list of the recipient projects?

193 points by johnny_reilly 4y ago

Onion headline: Billionaire pays 500k to charity instead of paying $5 million dollars in tax! Context - Github copilot license violations.

encryptluks2 4y ago

I wonder if this is evenly distributed? $500,000 may seem like a lot but that comes out to about $500 per maintainer. This doesn't appear to be an ongoing subscription either. I personally would rather Microsoft keep the money and spend it on open sourcing their own products instead of trying to find more ways to exploit others.

rglullis 4y ago
Whynotboth.jpg?
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  Because Microsoft is incapable of doing both. They will keep taking more than they give back. I'd rather have someone keep $500 than give it to me so they can go around and brag about it and then later find out they've been using my stuff without my permission because they felt like I owed it to them.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    If your work is FOSS, they don't "owe" you anything, just like you don't owe anything to them if they decide to support you. And, yes, $500k is relatively nothing for them. But I don't see how "relatively" nothing is better than actually nothing.
    - fnord123 4y ago
      The context of reselling code is copilot which is of questionable legality. They owe you a copyright header when distributing your BSD or MIT licensed code. They owe you adhering to the GPL license when distributing your GPL licensed code.
      - rglullis 4y ago
        That is a separate issue, and unless they think that money would be enough to settle any license violations, it has nothing to do with donating some cash to maintainers.
        fnord123 4y ago
        It's not a separate issue. It's the issue GP was referring to.
      - encryptluks2 4y ago
        That is exactly what I was referring to. I wonder if some people are just unfamiliar with copilot licensing issues or they don't see how that is an issue.
        rglullis 4y ago
        Of course the Copilot thing is problematic and they should not let be off the hook for it, but Copilot is not even referenced in the blog post. My read is that they are giving the money to projects they use to develop GitHub itself. And if this has nothing to do with the Copilot issue, why bring it to the conversation?
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    Why are you contributing to open source projects if you don't want people to be able to use your contributions without your permission? You seem to be making a mistake.
numbsafari 4y ago
Microsoft had over $61 Billion in net income in FY2021. This is 0.0008% of that. They should probably be paying more, not less.
- drstewart 4y ago
  Yep. It's like Bainbridge Health, spun out of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia which had $3 BILLION in revenue in FY2021 and $10 BILLION in assets. How much did Bainbridge Health give to open source health platforms? Hopefully at least .001% of those amounts.
  - numbsafari 4y ago
    You are comparing revenue to earnings, for one thing. MSFT FY21 Revenue was $168 Billion. They also report having $350 Billion in assets.
qubyte 4y ago
I got $550 so I think it's split evenly (they state it's shared between 900 folk in the blog post, which I assume is rounded). It's a one off as you say. Even if they do this next year, this event will have prompted a lot of folk to set up sponsors, so we'd all get a smaller cut.
- morelisp 4y ago
  > this event will have prompted a lot of folk to set up sponsors Shh, you're not supposed to explain the trick.

JulianWasTaken 4y ago

I got $550 from this yesterday (as did a few others I asked, so I think the dollar amount was the same for everyone). Not life changing but certainly always a nice way to start the day, with some unexpected $$.

Fnoord 4y ago
This is a PR stunt, but that does not mean we should not be allowed to appreciate it. The impact is going to differ per country. For example, 550 USD might not be much for an average American programmer but for an average Ukrainian or Indian (the latter has a heart connected to) its a whole lot more. I also suppose Russian devs are out of luck.
- fnord123 4y ago
  They are literally paying people to stay on GitHub instead of moving to gitlab. Reminds me of their OEM deals. Microsoft never changes.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    Do you have any other alternative for FOSS developers to get funding? Is Google paying anything? Do they still do GSOC? What about Apple? I mean, of course MS is not donating out of pure altruism. But so what?
    - rsstack 4y ago
      Google's GSoC is still happening every year.
      - rglullis 4y ago
        Good, but it is still not an alternative for funding open source maintainers.
        4y ago

hellerve 4y ago

I’m of two minds about this: - On the one hand, for GitHub, 500k is nothing, just a PR move. For maintainers, $500 might make the difference between struggling to pay rent and having enough money to leave it in the bank, or having a nice dinner at the end of the month. - On the other hand, for GitHub, 500k is nothing, just a PR move! If they really wanted to show appreciation for the maintainers that power a billion dollar business, more than a drop in the bucket would be great. So, I guess it boils down to: that’s a great start, don’t stop there!

OJFord 4y ago
Yeah as soon as I got to 'who are also signed up with GitHub Sponsors' I thought 'hmm, this came out of the marketing budget didn't it'. Which is nice for the recipients of course, but otherwise is what it is.
- masukomi 4y ago
  i would bet good money that GitHub controls a non-profit whose purpose is to give money to open source devs. Otherwise every donation to a sponsor would be a loss because they're passing on 100% of the money†. If, however, they're giving the money to a non-profit then it's all a tax write-off for them. † yeah, yeah, soon they'll be charging 10% to companies who sponsor, but I'm betting us little folks donating are cumulatively at least a million dollars and they probably don't want to loose hundred thousand when they could have a tax credit for it.
  - weird-eye-issue 4y ago
    That's not how basic accounting and taxes works You don't pay taxes on revenue, you pay it on profit. If they pay out all the revenue they owe taxes on $0
amelius 4y ago
We need funding of OS projects like how science is funded. Letting a company do it is not a good idea. Not saying that science funding is perfect.

oefrha 4y ago

No good deed goes unpunished. They didn’t have to do this, and now that they did, not surprisingly people (who probably aren’t even the recipients) are complaining that the amount is too tiny, the donation isn’t ongoing, etc. Wouldn’t it be nice if the complainers’ employers paid a tiny, one time $550 to open source projects they depend on.

blagie 4y ago
I usually don't consider something to be a good deed if more money is spent promoting the deed than cost of the deed. That's kind of my threshold. I often see that a corporation spends e.g. $1M on a marketing blitz about a $50,000 donation, or runs some campaign where consumers need to do something for some very nominal donation somewhere. The cynic in me also looks at this as a bribe. Someone who got a $500 gift is much more likely to stay on github. Do that for the top 1000 projects, and you've stemmed the flow to gitlab. The cynic in me became a lot more cynical when github started selling my own code back to me with copilot.
- oefrha 4y ago
  To companies using my open source projects: please donate $550 then go on a $1m marketing blitz telling everyone about it. I don’t care how you spend your money outside your donation. Now, this is a pseudonymous account so you obviously don’t know whether you use my projects. Just donate to whatever you use. To expand: I see grandstanding all the time. I see precious little money flowing into my PayPal tip jar. Casual users of my completely free web services have been a lot more generous than companies/developers using my open source libraries/tools. I’m completely fine with the lack of donations, but that certainly makes all the grandstanding from stingy people who don’t give a dime very annoying.
  - infinitezest 4y ago
    How do you know the people that are grandstanding are the same people that are stingy?
    - 4y ago

mnd999 4y ago

Thanks for training our model folks. We’re gonna charge $10 a month for your work but hey, here’s a one off $550

dotancohen 4y ago

> From the U.S. to Japan to Brazil, if you’re one of the people or projects we identified > then you will get a confirmation about the sponsorship before the end of June. How will this work for the Japanese? I've tried donating to Anki, maintained by someone in Japan, and it seems that accepting donations there is so problematic that he actually prefers just not to accept them.

captn3m0 4y ago

Wondering how they are counting dependencies. GitHub’s current dependency tooling (Dependabit, Dependency Graph) ignores Dockerfiles for eg, and anything installed on the OS level is not easily accounted either.

onlydnaq 4y ago

Something about that headline really irks me. I think GitHub is an amazing place for people to share code, I also think it’s really nice of them to do this. But the maintainers aren’t “their” maintainers. They are maintainers using GitHub for their projects. Probably just me overreacting, just thought I’d mention it.

Huggernaut 4y ago
I believe they are maintainers of the dependencies that GitHub uses.
throwaway27727 4y ago
They're referring to maintainers of projects that GitHub relies on for their own work, so calling them "our maintainers" isn't much of a linguistic stretch.

nl 4y ago

You can tell the people who neither run businesses or are open source maintainers. They are the ones complaining about both GitHub giving money to maintainers and spending money on marketing. To those people: there's no harm being done by this and there is good. That's how you judge something like this.

heurisko 4y ago
I wouldn't accept the money, because quantifying a altruistic/passionate/to scratch my itch act in terms of monetary value kills it. The same phenomenon applies to reluctance to remunerate blood donations. > Some studies in psychology and economics have found that material incentive discourages prosocial behaviors and causes decrease in blood supply. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2847338/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2847338/ I think the one-off donation to be completely tin-eared. They should offer to pay a salary to developers working on critical infrastructure, Jetbrains effectively did this with Nikita Popov, or leave open source alone. GitHub has shown they are naive regarding psychology around this area.
- nl 4y ago
  Offering rewards in advance is not the same psychologically as receiving surprise rewards because of work already done. Also while I'm familiar with the debate around incentives for blood donations that particular paper you have cited is terrible. Notably they do a literature review where they find discussions about how it could theoretically undermine motivations, but don't address the counter-argument they mention themselves where they list example of rewards being used to successfully increase supply! They list studies where it both decreased and increased supply, which seems to indicate that the type of incentive and the conditions in which it was offered make a significant difference. They end up arguing that there are risks that incentivized donors come from groups of higher risk of infectious blood diseases. This may or may not true, but is a different argument to if incentives work.

beastman82 4y ago

The reason everyone's so cynical about this is because Copilot is literally selling this code and it reeks of public relations rather than charity.

serial_dev 4y ago
Yes, the timing of this really makes me think that it could be to divert attention from the negative press that copilot got. Having people talk about whether 500k is the right amount to donate for a gigantic company like Microsoft is much better than people discussing the ethics, legality, trustworthiness and pricing of copilot. Last week we talked about whether or not it is legal to use license x to train their AI or if they will secretly steal our proprietary code and accidentally leak it for everyone else to see. Today we talk about whether the nice gesture for maintainers are enough.
nickjj 4y ago
Yes and if I were to guess a lot of folks who are upset about copilot stealing and selling code don't have GitHub sponsors enabled so it feels not genuine. It reads more like "here's a friendly reminder that you can make money with open source as long as you enable GitHub sponsors which btw will make us money too[0]!". [0]: Organizations will have at least a 10% fee taken from GitHub once the beta is finished. There's also no guarantee that personal accounts will remain fee-less too, this could easily be "just another" spot where a company offers something for free for mass adoption and then charges for it later. In any case it's marketing for a feature that provides revenue to GitHub.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

wly_cdgr 4y ago

buro9 4y ago

Hmmm... I never finished updating my Github Sponsor thing, so I've just done that. But as someone that tended to create orgs for projects rather than have it all under a personal account, should I move all of the projects? I guess so, right? What's the recommended way to move Go repos without breaking them for all users? (I have low-thousands of stars, but the largest project is used by mid-thousands of projects - so I anticipate breakage for my hopeful $5 one-off solo sponsor). Something like using a vanity import path for all projects? https://sagikazarmark.hu/blog/vanity-import-paths-in-go/ https://sagikazarmark.hu/blog/vanity-import-paths-in-go/

cdrini 4y ago
I'm not entirely sure, but I think if your personal account is marked as a maintainer for the repo, it doesn't matter if the repo is under its own org? I feel like most projects create org accounts, so would be kinda surprised if that wasn't supported somehow.
- buro9 4y ago
  Yeah, but then I'd need to create and maintain a lot of org accounts.
  - cdrini 4y ago
    Hmm I'm not sure I understand. Here's what I'm assuming: You currently have some number of org repos; eg: my-project/my-project, foobar/foobar And you have your personal account: buro9. You use your personal account to commit and maintain those org repos. As long as you set your personal account as an admin/maintainer on those org repos, I think you get all the benefits you need? I don't think there's any benefit to moving eg my-project/my-project to buro9/my-project
Latty 4y ago
The .github/FUNDING.yml file in the repo determines who will be shown as people to sponsor, it's not related to the account or org that controls the repo.

deleted 4y ago

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hrdwdmrbl 4y ago

On the one hand, that's the salary of 2-5 engineers. Pure PR. On the other hand, it's more than $0.

frenkel 4y ago

Nice little gem I didn’t know about at the end of the article: https://github.com/sponsors/explore https://github.com/sponsors/explore

jrochkind1 4y ago
Cool! I'd love to be able to filter by language. My main work is not JS and my JS dependencies are kind of incidental to it, but JS repos dominate the listing for me, I guess just by how JS is so dependency prolific.
- frenkel 4y ago
  Use the "ecosystem" filters in the sidebar (on desktop) or at the bottom (on mobile).

johnny_reilly 4y ago

I'm really disappointed with the conversation this has provoked. I was a fortunate recipient of this and I am delighted. I'm pleased about the money, that's great. But more than that I was really thrilled to discover that I had indirectly worked on GitHub; because I love GitHub. I feel like I should qualify this further. I actually missed the original email and spent a day or so realising friends and open source colleagues were being recognised, whilst believing my own OSS wasn't in the mix. And I was pleased for them. I've been doing OSS for more than a decade. I enjoy it. I wish companies directly supported it, as paying for what you value is responsible and wise. GitHub just did that. Thank you GitHub. I appreciate it. This was a good thing. Well done!

fartcannon 4y ago
- nicce 4y ago
  This is quite problematic area indeed. If developers are happy for receiving 500$ for decades of their work, what justifies paying more in the future? I guess everything is good and there is no need to change anything. I get it, that it is the idea of open source, but the demands are increasing towards authors while they just use their spare time in most of the cases. More of their work is used to generate money, but authors are receiving barely anything.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > There's a Radiohead lab episode about money the gov gives the families of the people it kills. Hey fartcannon, I think you're saying that GitHub surprising open source developers with cash gifts is analogous to governments compensating families for killing relatives. My only thought on this is: I hope that you're okay, and if you need help I hope you'll seek it. It's been a tough few years.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - 4y ago

0des 4y ago

I lost respect for a lot of you today who had the nerve to suggest that these amounts aren't enough money. For the OSS contributions I've made, I've never been given a penny or even so much as a single coffee for the things I've created, but if someone did, it could be a nickel and I'm not going to say anything but thank you. Nobody owes you anything in this world, and a little grace goes a long way in this industry. For those of you who complained about the money, you people need to reflect on your attitudes and what brought you to this point. Ugly.

selykg 4y ago
Judge much? I’m not a maintainer but adjacent to the tech industry (Ed tech) and am hurting for money due to inflation, and I live in a low cost of living area. You don’t know everyone’s situation. Stop judging them.
- vaylian 4y ago
  First of all: Everyone should have enough money to live a life in dignity. However, this is about public open source projects. You can earn money with those projects. But then you also have to clearly communicate this. Either by asking for donations, sponsorship or offer a support contract. Because the default model of open source is: Here is some code, here is the license, feel free to use it without going through a paywall first.
- sidlls 4y ago
  There's a great way to work in software without hurting for money: stop giving away labor for free. I can and will judge them, especially the ones who complain about this money specifically because of their choices.
fartcannon 4y ago
What's ugly here is calling your peers names just to defend a huge corporations PR.
- targafarian 4y ago

Caligatio 4y ago

I got the email on Friday telling me I'm one of the fortunate few to get $550 and cynically thought that it was some sort of GitHub credit; needless to say that I was pleasantly surprised that it was actual cash! I've been solo maintaining my project since 2008 and average about ~425,000 downloads/week per NPM. My sum total of donations prior to GitHub's was maybe $5. Making money on a JavaScript library was certainly never my goal but I sincerely appreciate the acknowledgement that my project has worth that someone is willing to pay for.

fartcannon 4y ago
Which library?
- c0balt 4y ago
  Not op, but they probably refer to jsSHA[0]. (Based on author name of repo and package) [0]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/jssha https://www.npmjs.com/package/jssha
  - fartcannon 4y ago
    Thanks, might as well spread the word right?
  - Caligatio 4y ago
    Yep, that's me! It's a niche project (even more so when I started it to salt/hash passwords client side during the expensive SSL days) so it's almost never worth advertising :)
    - fartcannon 4y ago
      Maybe not glamorous, but definitely has worth (so many downloads!)
andrew_ 4y ago
same! I maintain a humble little lib used by prettier, etc and it receives 5.5 million weekly downloads. I've got a few more like that as well. They've never received a donation, and I have just a few monthly donors (to which I'm very grateful) so this was cool to see.

synu 4y ago

There’s something a little creepy about referring to the maintainers as “ours.”

akerl_ 4y ago
Why? They donated to projects that GitHub's code depends on. The person who brings me my mail is accurately referred to as "my mail person". Not because I somehow own them, but because they're the person who provides service to my home. Would you feel the same way if they'd said "We're adding new features for our users"?
- synu 4y ago
  I think it’s because they are the maintainers of their projects, not maintainers of GitHub. So calling them GitHub’s maintainers sounds off, even if GitHub depends on their projects. It’s a weird application of the transitive property. I suspect the maintainers would definitely say they are a user of GitHub. Most would not say they are a maintainer of GitHub (at least I don’t think so).
  - akerl_ 4y ago
    They are both "maintainers who use GitHub's platform" and "maintainers of software GitHub depends on". "Our maintainers" is just as normal as "Our neighbor" or "Our users". To pick the most adverse example: GitHub could equally talk about Gitlab and say "Our competitor". They're clearly not saying Gitlab belongs to them or giving them some kind of connection that doesn't exist.
    - synu 4y ago
      Still sounds strange to me though I can understand your point. “One of our competitors” to me sounds the same as “one of our users”, and different from “one of our maintainers” when referring to someone who is not a maintainer of GitHub. It’s sounds more (to me) like calling someone else’s kids one of your children because they are visiting your house. Anyway, I can only imagine how uninteresting this conversation must be to anyone else :)

philliphaydon 4y ago

Does anyone know what `font-feature-settings` does? ProtonMail and GitHub both use this setting and it causes fonts to display weird in Firefox. Examples here: https://twitter.com/philliphaydon/status/1541021821637922816 https://twitter.com/philliphaydon/status/1541021821637922816

lights0123 4y ago
It changes different settings in the font. In GitHub's case, they use the font "Alliance No.1". ss02 doesn't appear to have a visible effect, but ss01 changes the letter a from a rounded body with a stem on top to a rounded body with a straight stem on the right. You may have custom fonts disabled—these feature settings do the right thing on GitHub's and ProtonMail's ("Arizona") fonts, but make your system fonts do weird things. Both sites appear just fine for me on Firefox on Linux.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  Ah. I forgot I turned that setting off years ago. I guess the Firefox account saves settings. Just need to figure out how to disable that css option. Thanks for the info!

fartcannon 4y ago

Divide et impera!

carapace 4y ago

On the one hand, hooray for half a million dollars for the hardworking folks "down in the trenches" who seldom receive the appreciation or remuneration they so richly deserve. Hoorah! On the other hand, this does nothing for me as a Free software fanatic to make Github and Microsoft any more palatable. I still can't believe that a closed, proprietary centralized webapp has so completely co-opted both the git DCVS and FOSS itself. (I've heard people unironically call Github the "flagship of the FOSS movement".) The image I get is of the boss riding by in a gilded carriage casting handfuls of gold coins to the serfs. Some of the comments here are of the "shut up and be grateful" ilk, and some even try to shame people for not being sufficiently grateful and/or uncritical. I call BS on that. If Github/MS find themselves in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation in re: supporting FOSS maintainers it's only because of their own actions and history. If they really wanted to thank FOSS folks they could open source Github, eh? Or Windows.

toastal 4y ago

Did anyone get $500 that didn't signup for GitHub's payment process or putting their non-standard `.github/` folder in your repository? This feels like a FOMO play to get more users to add GitHub mirrors to their project to try to dominate the Code forge space and tangential donations (which is why they did a loss-leading match program in the beta). I'd rather not prop that up; I'll stick to Sourcehut and Codeberg/Gitea.

makeworld 4y ago
As I understand it this is only for users who are part of the GitHub Sponsors program. I don't think the .github folder is relevant.
HellsMaddy 4y ago
Tangential: you don’t have to put a .github folder in every repository. You can create a .github repository and put files like FUNDING.yml in there, and they will take effect across all of your repos.
rurban 4y ago
How should they ship $500 to people of whom they don't have their bank account info?
- toastal 4y ago
  Other people link their Liberapay, et. al. in the README. Many projects live outside of GitHub too that have links to donations on their sites.
- account42 4y ago
  They could ask those users for bank account info or alternative payout methods?

smokey_circles 4y ago

I think it's pretty pathetic some of you are focused on copilot (as if youve never ripped code off SO before). I'm willing to bet none of you have contributed anything to open source either. Dunning-Kruger effect on full display. To the rest, congratulations and thank you from those of us who thanklessly use your hard work. I hope this kind of public appreciation takes off and we see more large names using this as a template.

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goodpoint 4y ago

Downvote me to hell, but for-profit companies do not give donations in order to decrease their profit. Microsoft github might be doing this to retain projects that might be switching to non-corporate forges, or appease the concerns around copylot. Or expand "github Sponsors" and achieve even more control over the FOSS community. Beware of strangers bearing gifts.

dmix 4y ago

Is there a list of the recipient projects?