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GitHub Sponsors

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2,082 pointsHeliosmaster501 comments

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/ 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!

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.

Take a look at the Webpack page that GP mentioned. This is already happening

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.

I think there would be significant benefits to all parties if GitHub just put the proper automated scaffolding for large scale sponsoring in place instead of relying on such ad-hoc conventions:

1) Individual developers and the companies that want to sponsor projects will otherwise just continue to talk past each other. The developers ask "Why aren't companies donating?" while the very use of the word donation is already a complete showstopper for a company that otherwise doesn't flinch at dropping $50K on a one-day booth at a developer conference that draws maybe 15K visitors at best (a website like Material UI or Webpack probably does 10x that in a month, a perfect fit!). If GitHub doesn't set the system in place, large players like Webpack will continue to "get it" (they offer invoices for sponsors!) while Bob with his 5K stars project will be left out.

2) If the attribution is on a case-per-case basis, companies will continue to select just a few big showcase projects. If the handling is uniform it would be much easier for companies to do things like spreading their spend out all over some segments like "top-100 Go projects" or "libraries built on top of D3" or whatever audience they'd like to target.

3) If there is actually significant uptake in a project, meaning more than a handful of sponsors, it quickly becomes a serious timesink for developers just to track who is active which month at which tier, which sponsors churned etc. and then to actually attribute everything correctly. How about, sponsor picks the project, developer does nothing except gets paid, and all campaign links, logos etc. automatically taken care of. Hmm, I guess what I'm describing is sort of like an AdWords for GitHub now that I think of it :)

Or this: It should come out your R&D budget because it is critical tech, and some marketing funds should be diverted to R&D.

Marketing and Sales budgets are bigger than R&D at most tech companies. So, you can work with the people who's job is literally to spend that allocated pot of money every single month. Or you can try to change how businesses operate.

If your ultimate goal is to work on OSS and to get companies to chip in, I'm quite convinced the former will yield better results and be less frustrating for everyone involved.

This is actually great in so many aspects for companies. GitHub could even change the way companies handle open-source development (in the same way Uber changed taxi market).

Instead of hiring (and keeping) full-time developer (and paying insurance, taxes, etc.) company can abuse this system and 'convince' employee that they can continue working for their project as a contract-free open-source developer and get same 'salary' (or more when this project become successful).

In such case they will be able to fire him (or replace with 'cheaper' one) and no one will be able to complain. I'm sure it can happen in some countries with weak labour rights.

So they can chase two rabbits ($$$ for marketing and $ for developemnt).

Is this an offer? Because we would do it :)

But your company probably doesn’t depend on our software.

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.

I've done a lot of volunteer work over the years and I've spent a lot of years developing web projects (not as a programmer).

The thing is that idealistic efforts and commercial efforts tend to have an inherent conflict of interest that a donation model helps get around.

I take tips and Patreon on my projects, plus I do a certain amount of paid work. The minute you start commercializing it, you need to do it for the money and someone else will be telling you what matters to them. It actively interferes with you doing what you think is best organically.

Once in a while, someone manages to find some sweet spot where their career and their ideals fit together nicely. But most folks need to do drudge work that they don't find morally objectionable to pay the bills, then find other avenues to express their ideals.

I think it's a great thing that it is now possible for some people to do a thing for idealistic reasons or the like and have a few bucks kicked their way for their trouble. But I think it kind of misses the point if you want to suggest ways to commercialize it. People can already do that by starting a regular, old fashioned business.

OSS is generally about doing a thing that serves humanity in some important metrics. And I wish serving humanity and making a profit were easier to marry together. But, in practical terms, I think that's just a hard thing to do.

Giving people a third option to do a thing they believe in and have a few bucks kicked their way seems like a way out of that trap so more people can try to do things "for the right reason" rather than for the almighty dollar.

I completely agree with you in some cases.

However as a data engineer I strongly doubt that many (any) of the dozens of open source projects I use on a weekly basis were created for idealistic reasons.

They were almost all tools (or collections of tools) that were created to fill a business need, or to make a developer's life easier, and then open sourced for one reason or another.

I don't see any conflict with corporate sponsorship of these projects.

I'm not at my best. Maybe someone other than me can find Patrick McKenzie's HN comment about "please make it easy for me to get an invoice instead of calling it a donation because I have to comply with tax laws and yadda, but would be happy to support your open source project if I actually use it for business purposes and can get the piece of paper called an invoice that my accountant and the government insist on."

I think that's a good direction that is probably underdeveloped currently, though every single time I mention it someone points to a tweet of his rather than the actual HN comment. (Which is not the end of the world and maybe there's a better way to frame that, I'm just not at my best )

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863939

Yes, that's the one (with accompanying pertinent discussion).

Thanks.

The parent of this thread is someone in marketing suggesting ways this could come out of the marketing budget, very similar to the workaround of invoicing suggested in your linked comment. Both are ways to make donating to OSS a business expense rather than a charitable donation.

No, not really. Adding logos and yadda in exchange for remuneration is a really well established form of commercial monetization. In contrast, invoicing OSS is a new and innovative way to get cash for what you already do, just like a donation.

If people want to go that route, my comments on the internet aren't some kind of bar to that approach, so I'm not sure why you seem to feel some need to argue it.

But if you are doing open source for idealistic reasons and yadda, as per my comment, then invoicing per Patrick McKenzie's explanation is actually something new and innovative that serves a similar function to the donation model in terms of preserving an element of the OSS model that matters to some folks/projects, but opens up the possibility of getting it from a company. In addition to being something of a green field for the donation model and extra source of money, companies generally have deeper pockets than individuals.

I'm not telling anyone they aren't allowed to commercialize their project. I'm just saying it's a space I've thought long and hard about for many years and researched and yadda, and if you are in open source because a business model is antithetical to your mental models and goals for the project, then invoicing may suit your needs in cases where corporate sponsorship feels like the wrong answer.

Invoicing support, maintenance and custom development of open-source software is a more established practice than patreon-style donations to open-source developers.

I'm aware that OSS sometimes makes money on activities like customer support and custom development. That's not what's being discussed here.

We’re discussing it right now... I’m referring to the concept of “invoicing open-source” which you describe as “new and innovative”. I’m arguing that it’s not. It’s a variation of the support and custom development model which is already very common.

You don't need an invoice to make something a business expenses and or tax deduction.

Even in the case of an audit, the bank or credit card statement showing who the money was paid to is enough.

Now, if you are giving cash, you would definitely need an invoice.

That is not gonna fly where I am from. Our external accountant, CPA type guy, will absolutely hound our ass, and charge his hourly rate doing it, for the invoice corresponding to the VISA card charge.

Well of course the business can have their own policies. I am just saying what the law is and what the IRS is allowed to require you to keep. You don't have to keep receipts. There are lots of other acceptable forms of documentation.

https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

This is just flat wrong advice in every jurisdiction I’ve worked in and further wouldn’t fly at any employer. The bank statement may provide the WHO in the transaction, but the invoice / receipt / similar provides the most important part, the WHAT that was paid for.

No, you are wrong. Sure, employers will all have their own rules. But I am talking about IRS substantiation.

The IRS lists out the different forms of documentation needed to support your expenses.

https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

You can see right there under Expenses that credit card statements as well as cancelled checks are valid documentation for a write-off.

From your link:

> Your supporting documents should show the amount paid and a description that shows the amount was for a business expense.

A credit card statement typically doesn’t fulfill the second half of that requirement. That doesn’t mean the card statement isn’t a valid supporting document, just that it wasn’t enough by itself.

I too read an IRS document once, that doesn’t make me an expert on accounting. However, when every single finance person has stated that the WHAT was as important and then your own link says that too, I generally would back down and admit maybe I misunderstood and/or made a mistake. YMMV.

Debian is looking for corporate sponsors for our annual conference:

https://debconf19.debconf.org/sponsors/become-a-sponsor/

Yep 100% agree, this is how both Vue.js and Laravel have succeeded with "donations" on Patreon which are actually companies paying for advertising space on the project's respective websites. Both are doing 6 figures annually in recurring "donations", which is almost entirely from $xxxx/mo tiers targeted at businesses.

I think the other thing that is better about doing things this way is that when a company is buying ad-space from you, it's very clear what they are paying for. With the current peer-to-peer setup that was shipped this week, I guarantee the "please fix my issue I donate $10/month!" problem is much more likely than it is with a company who is paying to have their logo on your website.

This line of discussion ("Make it so we can pay you $xxK/mo, don't ask for donations.") comes up a lot on HN.

Here's what I did:

First, I spent four years developing security libraries for PHP developers that can be considered core infrastructure. Random_compat was an API-compatible polyfill of PHP 7's random_bytes() and random_int() functions for PHP 5 projects (and has over 100 million downloads). sodium_compat reimplemented most of libsodium in pure-PHP, and currently powers WordPress's signature verification functions. That's just two examples, I have over a dozen of distinct and useful libraries-- many of which have been adopted into popular frameworks-- that make your software materially more secure. If you're a serious player in the industry and your code base is PHP, you're running my code.

Okay, value delivered through open source? Check.

All of the above was also published through an LLC rather than just under an individual's name.

Then, I began offering the usual HN recommendations (support contracts, especially for EOL versions of PHP for Enterprise Linux customers).

I even created a streamlined workflow section on the company website and linked all of our open source projects to it: https://paragonie.com/enterprise

To date, the SQL tables that power that section of our website only has test records I created to make sure it was turned on correctly.

So I believe this to mean one of two things:

1. There's a missing step that I'm not doing that, once executed, will rake in the dollars.

2. The prescribed advice on message boards about how to run an open source business doesn't work.

(Until I figure out which it is, I'll have to continue doing code audits and penetration tests. Not exactly hurting for money, but it's not coming from the channels that people expect for open source. Enjoy the anecdata.)

https://packagist.org/packages/paragonie/random_compat

https://packagist.org/packages/paragonie/sodium_compat

https://make.wordpress.org/core/2019/05/17/security-in-5-2

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?"

Having worked with human beings before, I would say that it is considerably easier and more predictable if you just do some things yourself.

Working with folks outside of your employ (even if you pay them good money to do the work) will fail you far more often than working with one or more of your own employees.

I can't blame GitHub for doing this completely in-house.

Sure, the easy way is easier. But more often than not, the easiest way is not the best way for the entire ecosystem.

Rather than saying "How can we get money moving around on our platform as soon as possible?" they should have asked "How can we make open source work sustainable?".

But who can blame them really, it's a for-profit and closed source company on every level.

Money movements are not just calls to some external API - there's a lot of legal regulations around money movements.

> It would be cool if GitHub integrated with existing platforms and helped that to happen

They did that as well today today with support for a .github/FUNDING.yml. This file lets people provide links to Open Collective, Patreon, Community Bridge, Tidelift, Ko-Fi, a custom link and they show up as alternative sponsoring options for a repo: https://github.blog/2019-05-23-announcing-github-sponsors-a-....

I am, using Patreon.

Doing this took ten years of operating as a commercial entity earning respect, and then ramping up my productivity hugely to compensate for earning about a quarter what I'd be making as a commercial entity. On the other hand, it's predictable and steady, whereas operating as the commercial entity proved wildly unpredictable and stressful in a whole different, darker way.

UX is fine but the platform will never give people a survivable income by itself. You need to build a business like any other, and then be able to take a MASSIVE hit to your income for the sake of your principles.

I'm happy with my choices but other people really can't do likewise. Certainly not from scratch: you wouldn't gain enough traction. I work in the music business. There's a saying, how do you earn a million dollars running a recording studio? Start with ten million. It's a lot like that, and no payment platform is really going to help.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

   What non-nefarious reasons would GitHub have for making these decisions?

GitHub is owned by Microsoft now- they can afford to do this at a loss / zero sum amount because Microsoft thinks it's a good idea.

As long as Microsoft is being altruistic here, we should be fine.

I think.

I think the key perspective here is that of “the average GitHub user who mostly ends up there in the process of attempting to fetch a library” (a.k.a. to use GitHub as the ecosystem-library package manager of last resort, for libraries nobody bothered to put into an actual package; or for special feature-branches or tracking bleeding-edge development.)

If such users will be more attracted to donating to developers via GitHub itself, than via other systems linked to through the GitHub README they land on, then donations will spike.

And if, at some point, this program becomes opt-out instead of opt-in, then these users might decide to donate to all sorts of people who never considered themselves “open-source developers” but who just happen to slap code up on the internet for free, mostly as a way of proving the provenance of the binary releases they make. For example, developers in the game-console homebrew community, or the Hackintosh driver community, might suddenly see financial support.

You make a good point. I sponsor a couple of projects on opencollective, but it took an hour or so of reading before I trusted it enough to use. I think if it had been built into GitHub, I would have been much quicker to sponsor.

I agree with diggan’s point too, but the reality is this is likely to get more people paying more open source maintainers. I just wish it could be on an open platform.

> I just wish it could be on an open platform.

It could be. Letting GitHub get away with this without criticism feels like a failure of imagination. They could have done integration of an open platform (heck, even one they created) if they gave a fuck :(

The way I see it, it isn't an alternative to Open Collective that they're after. They've seen that it's fashionable for people to give money based on parasocial interaction. It's sort of like gambling, where there's a dopamine hit, but where the behavior doesn't get you meaningfully more involved with the community, whether it be Twitch, YouTube, or Facebook (just like gambling doesn't make you wealthier). I fell into that trap with Twitch for a while but cancelled all my subscriptions after realizing that my rationalizations for subscribing didn't hold up, and the real reason was the excitement of feeling like I was hanging out with a chess champion. I think there will probably be backlash after some stories of people spending more they can afford on Twitch subscriptions get out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction

It is nice to see people make money doing what they love, but I wonder how much they can really make if people aren't influenced by parasocial interaction.

The motivation for Open Collective of giving back to say thanks is a much more pure one than paying $5/mo on Twitch, of which Amazon gets a huge cut, to get a sense of belonging bolstered by custom emoji and subscriber-only programming.

> 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.

Yes, and they are absolutely _robbing_ the opportunity from others to build in this space, when there are already some really capable players who would have gotten somewhere great. This is a total asshole, closed source company approach. The "loss leader" thing feels totally malicious, and designed to starve the open competition. This is classic Microsoft and rolls back all the positive feelings that had been growing about their growing in the right direction. Amazon does the same shit, to starve competition: "Yeah, you've a spot on our system, but we're going to steal every feature and embed our deeper and drive you out."

For a real example of how OPEN companies work together: Balanced Payments was a daring effort to run an open source payment processor. When they wanted a way to fund and support Gratipay, they went in and submitted a pull request to incorporate their own open source payment processor into the Gratipay platform. If GitHub were in the true spirit of open source, it would have engaged OpenCollective in such a capacity.

I am really disappointed about the hooray optimism and lack of criticism in this thread. I feel like we're all failing to engage in critical engagement with this idea and premise.

Your comment reads that you're angry at Github for not taking a more open source approach. That's a fine opinion to have, but it doesn't make sense to demonize them for being a for-profit company. They are not robbing anyone of anything.

Starving the competition with loss-leader tactics is not an unbeatable strategy. If, however, you don't have anything to offer other than a run of the mill payment processing platform, then yea, you're going to have a tough time beating someone who can cut costs. They have a feature you don't, you should lose.

> That's a fine opinion to have, but it doesn't make sense to demonize them for being a for-profit company.

Because some people are just born as for-profit companies?

Labels are useful to classify behaviour, but that doesn't automatically excuse that behaviour.

What kind of critical engagement do you think we are failing to offer? What kind of response would leave you thinking "This person engaged critically with the issue at hand, but still came away with a strongly positive position"?

For my own part, I don't think anybody is owed a position in a space. I also don't think the existence of small players that get displaced by a big player means that the small players were destined to become big players. It's worth considering that LiberaPay and OpenCollective would never have gotten somewhere great. Perhaps they would always have been doomed to be small and essentially irrelevant. We'll never know, obviously, but it's worth considering.

But let's talk about OpenCollective and how Github could have worked with them. Do you think OpenCollective would have passed a security audit? Are they SOC compliant? Could they have handle the scale?

An even more interesting question: has Github ever claimed to be an OPEN company? I'm certainly not aware of such, though of course my knowledge is less than comprehensive. Charging them with failing to be something that they've never claimed to be seems odd.

Yes. Your charge is correct in an important detail. Github isn't an open source company. As far as I can tell they never have been. It's perhaps somewhat less than maximally reasonable to expect them to become one.

For my own part, this enhances my positive feelings about Microsoft running Github. They're making changes to popularize the idea that it's OK to pay developers to do open source, and doing so in a way that lets developers get paid in a manner of their choice.

It could still be an open platform, of course. Someone just needs to be able to do it better than Github. As Dependabot shows, that's absolutely possible.

> I also don't think the existence of small players that get displaced by a big player means that the small players were destined to become big players. It's worth considering that LiberaPay and OpenCollective would never have gotten somewhere great. Perhaps they would always have been doomed to be small and essentially irrelevant.

I think the difference between small and big players depends also on what their goals are. If the goals of (first Gratipay and then) Liberapay are to fund cool people and cool work, it doesn't matter how much of the funding space they take up as long as they're paying the bills and surviving. If the goal of GitHub is to make $$$ on fees, then yeah, they're going to feel like every other platform is a threat to that goal.

IMHO, there is much more space for different multiple funding platforms than people realize.

> It could still be an open platform, of course. Someone just needs to be able to do it better than Github. As Dependabot shows, that's absolutely possible.

Awkward, this literally happened today: https://dependabot.com/blog/hello-github/

(I agree with the thrust of your comment; I just think the timing here is funny.)

That's actually exactly my point. Dependabot did Github security alerts so much better than Github did, that Github gave up on trying to compete entirely.

Which is to say that it's incontrovertibly possible to beat Github at their own game and on their own platform. To the point where even Github agrees they've been beat.

More options is better in this case.

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.

> 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.

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.

It wouldn't surprise me if maintainers suddenly start ignoring issues from non-sponsors because they can't handle all of them.

> 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?

> 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.

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.

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.

> Often these opportunistic parasites would never contribute anything back

So a user of open source to make money is a parasite? Are people that use LibreOffice to type legal documents they charge money for considered parasites if they don’t contribute to source code or financially to LibreOffice? If that’s the case, there is an incentive to use closed source software and just pay for it so as to avoid having to be called parasites and incur the pontifications. How many people here use Postgres but never contribute to it? I might guess it’s 99.99%. If I am running a business and there is an expectation that I pay for open source either in time or money, then that makes it no different from a cost perspective than paying for closed source — which lowers the incentive to use open source in the first place. “It’s free software, but if you use it for free, you’ll be called a parasite.” Sure. That’s a great way to promote open source. If open source people want to get paid for open source, then charge money for it, don’t simply use a passive-aggressive guilt trip, just be upfront.

Yeah I disagree that the users have to contribute something back. Half the value of a project comes from the users. The other half comes from the developers. If no one uses your software then it's worthless and it wouldn't matter if you spent all day playing video games instead. If someone else does end up using your software and builds a business around it and you don't like it then you should either start a business yourself or alternatively think of your work as returning the favor to all the other open source developers who have worked for free and will benefit from your project directly or indirectly by making proprietary software cheaper.

> 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

> 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.

How so? If anything, it would be cool to have issue bounties to put your money to get the stuff you want solved.

For the same reason lobbying is harmful. The many should be served, not just those who can pay.

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.

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.

> 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

It'll also be interesting to see how GitHub competitors respond.

GitLab may be in a position to do so, unsure about others.

Is there any reason why you couldn't mirror your repo on github for the donations platform?

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 which appears to clarify that you'd be sponsoring a developer not a repo/org... which means popularity/celebrity is everything. Oh well.

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.

LiberaPay seems popular with developers. But Patreon is not unheard of either. The guy that codes Inkscape is on Patreon for instance.

> 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.

Huh? Am I the only one that has exactly the opposite line of thinking? If I see an underfunded project that I enjoy, I’m much more likely to donate than if something already makes many digits money.

Don't get me wrong, I agree.

I was just commenting what I have been witnessing over the years is all.

This logic is strange.

If this repo receives $20 a month, if I donate $5 I'll increase their budget by 1/4, a huge impact.

If this repo receives $500 a month, my $5 will increase their budget by 1%, barely visible.

In practice, it is not strange at all.

The person you replied to tried to highlight why that particular framing a bad metric to highlight in an OSS project.

People respond better to something like:

this repo needs $500/mo to achieve X;

$1000/mo to achieve Y and;

$2000/mo to achieve Z. We have received $200 in funding for this month."

rather than the example given above:

"this repo receives $500 per month"

The first framing emphasizes your needs, the second framing emphasizes your current situation. The first is better because it gives any potential donor actionable information to decide whether you need a donation or not, and more importantly, how much impact their donation will make if they choose to donate.

A donor can make an out-sized impact on a project with a stretch goal of "$2000/mo to achieve Z" that has only received $200 in donor funds by providing the $1800 balance for instance.

I don't disagree. I'm sharing what I have been observing in the past.

Many people who get paid this way prefer the 1% case to the 25% case. It's much more stable. This means if you decide to stop, they only lose 1%, not 25%.

I mean, people are still going to enjoy getting more money, don't get me wrong. But they'd rather have 1000 people giving a dollar than two people giving 500.

Exactly your last. We could all take a page out of the Twitch streamers' books -- they do exactly like this: (a) set donation or subscription goals and (b) make it really cheap and (c) aim for volume.

Well what I'd like to do is establish a stack of budgets against a project, e.g. Kickstarter Goals.

$500 p/m = all hosting and domain costs paid for

$750 p/m = we'll use some paid service that makes the service better in some way

$1k p/m = we'll reward contributors $250 p/m distributed across those who contributed to PRs but exact distribution determined by repo admins

And then to have a budget associated to the lowest one being the means for the project to survive... with a running total on that one, showing deficits (because I do have to still cover raw costs and those end up on my credit card the months I fall short, so future months should help recoup that).

In this way, it would be extremely clear what funds a project needs to survive and how donations and support makes a difference.

NB: My projects do fine... we get enough support to be viable. But damn it would be great to not manage it all manually, it's a chore I'd like to give up so I can code more.

I like your tiers idea - optionally you could even make that happen by tying it to the Marketplace. IOW - "Help pay for our <SAAS> subscription!"

I'm sure it's possible to put that info in README.md and handle things according to that month's donation amount.

I don't know that a GitHub-run tier system will suit everyone, when a developer (the primary users of GH, of course) could easily just automate the update of the relevant info in the README or some other relevant document in the repo on a cadence that suits the project and the developer.

It would be really neat if the eventually introduce some type of dependency sharing.

Ie, huge project X built on top of Y and Z show that 30% of donations go to Y and Z.

If Github can start automatically recognizing dependencies it could also incentivize people to "properly" (whatever that means) share donations.

>If Github can start automatically recognizing dependencies

I think that they already do this for JavaScript, Ruby, and Python dependencies[0]. However I don't think doing it automatically is the way to go, one dependency may be "worth" way more than another, and some dependencies may go undetected (e.g. if I conditionally sneak -lfoo into my LDLIBS somewhere)

[0]: https://github.blog/2017-11-16-introducing-security-alerts-o...

Yea, definitely agree about automatically. For me the biggest problem with automatic is, exactly as you said, the worth of varying projects.

I think automatic inclusion would also run the risk of OSS becoming less integrated. Ie, if I include another dependency I risk losing money, incentivizing me to reinvent wheels so long as I have the ability.

Funny, I act completely opposite to this with respect to Patreon. If I see content that I enjoy is only getting minor donations I'm very likely to donate, even if Patreon sponsorship doesn't get me anything more. On the other hand, if a project has high donations I am unlikely to donate unless sponsorship gets me access to something additional, and even then I am more critical with the decision.

I think GitHub is more like the first scenario. You're already getting the content (code) regardless if you pay for support or not.

I'm curious if, in the long term, GitHub will extend this functionality to integrate benefits: faster support, pay for features, even access to repos for various tiers.

I'm exactly like you but my anecdotal evidence shows that we are the minority.

And yep, I'd like to see those same additional features. One-off small payments instead of a recurring donation is a must as well; many can't afford to donate on a regular basis.

Hey, Devon here. :)

> The only question I have is how easy it would be for those who don’t use Github to subscribe to a recurring donation?

Thanks for the question buro9! All it takes to become a sponsor is an email address and payment method. Our goal is to make sponsorships as friction-free as possible.

Re: individual/repo/org question, GitHub Sponsors is launching small and simple, and as we learn from the initial beta program, we’ll look to expand the ways to participate. One thing we’ve done is put together an advisory panel of open source teams to better understand their unique needs. We’d love to have your voice on the panel, if you’re interested! Send me an email -- devonzuegel@github.com.

Well feel free to enable my GH account... @buro9 there too (verified by https://keybase.io/buro9 )

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Very shortsighted view. The purity view is the thing that prevented open source from taking over for the longest time.

No, there will definitely be people making money from this. Say Evan You, creator of vue is making 18k a month in patreon https://www.patreon.com/evanyo. Why wouldn't people use github now instead?

> I will not be using github sponsors for my open source projects...

Why not? There's no shame in asking people to support your work if they are benefiting. In fact, some of the people using your projects might be making money from your work. To you it's about purity, to me it's about you letting yourself be exploited.

I’d be thrilled if people were making money from my work, that’s the point.

OK you should also get a part of that. Donations are very non commital for both sides. You aren't expected to do what your donors tell you to. It will help you spend more time on your projects. Like it's in the interest of the users to give you money.

It’s not in their interest to give me money, they have no interest in that at all. They simply want me to continue working and updating my project so they can keep making money.

I don’t need a part of their money. Those weren’t the terms that I put out my software with. Imagine if you had to donate money for every package and library you used. Building applications would get very expensive quickly, when it could just as easily be cheap and free.

Which is why it's optional.

Agree with everything you're saying, I really am surprised at how overwhelmingly positive the response has been for the most part on hacker news. I really don't see 99% of OSS project contributors making money from this, let alone enough money to make a living, but it's hard for me to interpret the response as much less than delusion.

People are probably going to get jealous/upset if they find out other contributors are getting more donations than them, especially if they feel their project/contributions are inferior to their own. A lot of people are suggesting they change things to make it so you donate to projects instead of individuals, but I feel this would be even worse. The politics of open source projects can already be big head aches, but throw money into the mix and it will get even worse, as someone will have to decide how to divide things up, and then we might get into a situation where people refuse to even contribute to a project unless they're guaranteed some sort of payment for their contribution.

It's obviously still a little early to be completely shitting on the idea, none of us really know what's going to happen, I just think everyone needs to temper the excitement a bit and take a moment for a reality check.

I generally share your concerns. Much of the current rewards in open source are intrinsic: the satisfaction of making something good, helping other people, the joy of working with others.

I think those incentives, to a pretty good degree, align with goals I have for software: for it to be high quality, holistically designed, and making the lives of the developers working on it more gratifying.

> There has always been a purity around writing open source software simply for the benefit of mankind.

At the same time, there is a downside to this purity. The freedom to spend time on open source "simply for the benefit of mankind" is a luxury only available to those who are already able to put food on the table.

I think this is a major reason why the open source demographics are aligned so strongly with traditionally privileged groups, and I think that's bad for humankind.

Pumping money into the system might help underrepresented groups participate in open source, which in turn means we'll get software that is better tuned to the needs of everyone and not just the privileged.

I probably wouldn't use GitHub sponsors either. I want to retain my sense of freedom over the direction I take my projects and I worry that cash payments would undermine that freedom and also undercut the intrinsic rewards I get for creating.

At the same time, I realize my choice to not take sponsorship is a luxury I have because I've got a fantastic day job and come from a position of privilege.

You'd be amazed at how many people "make demands to the creator to implement some feature or fix some bug" already when they're not paying any money.

I personally don't like this whole sponsorship thing. This sets up people to optimize for getting and retaining sponsors instead of doing things that they would have wanted. A better approach could have been to offer money o fix issue or implement feature. For example, you could file issue/feature request on a project where developer has indicated that they have no time to work on and then offer $1000 to fix it. This is small amount if you depend on it for your business. The developer can decide if its worth their time and interest.

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.

What about the Liberapay model? The platform is just one explicit project to which you can donate, just like any other. It's not a tax, nor running only on the creators' donations.

Great case of Dogfooding. Contribute here: https://liberapay.com/LiberapayOrg/

Is that something different than "An independent zero fee platform run entirely on altruism"? My critique of those want particularly strong: basically "nice if it works, but will it?".

I have to admit that it looks kind of promising now, but at current funding levels the organisation could still disappear faster than a Google API. And if it was more successful a new threat could become visible at the horizon, the failure mode of uncontrolled bloat, funded basically by threatening to allow an important institution to disappear. (Yes I'm talking about you, Wikimedia)

PS: thanks for bringing it up, looks interesting!

>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.

Maybe they meant credit card interchange fees of 1-3%?

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?

Because they can control it and use it as a moat.

Maybe so, but when did we suddenly start giving companies like Microsoft the benefit of the doubt on stuff like this?

They do not need donation cut because they already sell Windows etc.

From a few pages deeper: >In the future, we may charge a nominal processing fee.

That might be where they're headed, but from their diction I'm guessing they plan to try and keep this part of their business cost neutral. Who knows, maybe this is part of the ol' embrace extend extinguish, but I'm guessing they value the goodwill above the money in this case.

They should just use Google Pay API if that is the case. As far as I know they still don't charge fees.

No, they will take much less than Patreon. They will only charge the Stripe fees, which are much lower. And they will withhold nothing for Github by themselves, only for Stripe, their payment processor.

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.

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.

On the other hand it provides a way to measure the performance of the people being sponsored. it's a good fit.

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.

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.

Github's TOS already contains highly questionable language about a "license grant to us". I removed my code from Github when they added that, because I have no interest in risking giving Microsoft additional licenses to my software beyond those I give everyone.

The $5k matching would not even pay for a lawyer's time to review the current TOS and determine if that language in it actually does grant them an additional license.

Yeah, it's a shame the GitHub is starting to actually take advantage of their hosting monopoly, to the detriment of solutions like OpenCollective and Liberapay.

On the other hand, Git is distributed. Can't you just use GitHub as a mirror, and direct users elsewhere for actual development through the README?

Or just include external donation links in the readme?

I assume you can't just do that since GitHub might offer to give donors regular activity updates.

Then again I didn't know about liberapay or OpenCollective up until now and I do open source for a living.

> Meanwhile nonprofits and startups focused on solving the problem of open-source sustainability for everyone, not just Github customers, will suffer from this announcement.

Frankly, those startups/nonprofits haven't done a good enough job. If you want to be paid well in OSS it usually means you have to take on consulting work. If people were able to be paid well for working on OSS directly, there wouldn't be a problem for Github/MS to be solving here

> The subtext is pretty clear: “if you want to get paid, you better not leave Github!”

If you want to get paid as a video creator, you better not leave Youtube either

> If you want to get paid as a video creator, you better not leave Youtube either

That is of course Youtube's message to creators. But platform-neutral competitors like Patreon are keeping them in check. I hope the same thing happens with Github.

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!

They can have all these if they allow "pay with Ethereum".

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-but...

Open Collective already offers many of these features.

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

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-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

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#ab...

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?

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#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 :)

> Decision-makers at GitHub aren't stupid, and so the future their money creates should be assumed to be the one they intended.

This is always true, for any person or organization at any level of scale. They spend money to bend the world in the direction they want.

This is not a instrinsically bad thing. It's only a priori bad if you assume the world is zero sum and any change to benefit party A is necessarily a harm to all other parties.

I think you have to have a little more sophisticated analysis to see if something a business does is a net good or ill to the world. When I buy cookies, I acknowledge that I'm helping create a world where more cookies are bought and consumed. But I'm pretty on board with that world too, so that's OK.

In this case, I don't think anyone can accurately predict the large scale consequences of what GitHub is doing.

Thanks for the generous thoughts :) I know it's not intrinsically bad. But I suppose I am saying that this specific event is bad, in non-shallow analysis.

Yes, all things are aspiring to "bend the world" (i like that term) -- a kid putting up a poster for selling cookies from their pantry for 10c is trying to affect people.

But then there's greater bending, of almost all possible paths of significance. GitHub/GitLab are THE places in our digital lives as coders. The scale at which this intervention/distortion is happening is important.

The unfair squelching of funding experiments in open source land WILL affect paths outside software. OpenCollective was using their learnings and profits in serving FOSS, to affect non-digital projects in the social fabric of physical cities: https://opencollective.com/brussels

This unfair buying of the opportunity space -- afforded only by deep pockets of Microsoft -- will affects paths that were leading to much more collateral benefit for all of us. Most maintainers would need to be irrational to use anything BUT their system while the distortions are in place. Those supporting this launch bear some real responsibility for what becomes LESS possible in the world when this feature "takes the ball and goes home". (at least in terms of open source funding)

I truly don't feel I'm doing a shallow analysis here.

Anyhow, I really appreciate the attention you may have given this.

Disclaimer: I work adjacent to civic technology, government procurement and the distributed web. There are many exciting paths dancing around these things, and the execution of this launch (separate from the feature itself) is certainly not one of them imho

Ah I see, so if I understand correctly, it's more that you feel there is ill-intent behind Gihtub's move and their plan is to undercut existing players, and then to increase prices?

That feels to me, like one interpretation for sure, but there are others.

MS (like some other large tech. companies) make their money these days more from subscription services to cloud hosted systems.

Github feels, to me, like a play to provide a compelling ecosystem for developers, in the hopes that it translates to revenue from cloud.

Doing as you describe (upping charges on a service after getting rid of the competition) seems like it would backfire horribly on them from a PR perspective and the amount of money involved (a small percentage of the donations provided) would be a rounding error on Microsoft's income.

I think there's an ulterior motive, for sure, but the one I see as more likely is providing more stickiness to the MS developer ecosystem in efforts to translate to more ammunition in the cloud war with Google and Amazon...

If you felt like being cynical, you could say that this (along with the package repository stuff) is the beginning of the "extend" phase of the "embrace, extend, extinguish" of Microsoft of old.

On its face it's nothing but positive. But at the same time, many of us are recognizing that there's just something that feels a little bit off about this.

Thanks for validating the concern. Truly appreciate that.

I don't like to be cynical! I promise it's not my default mode!

There are a hundred more funding experiments to run in open source. And open source is the playground for the wider world to improve funding! (Non-profit land is effed, and they need help from our learning :) We need to try/fail/win at designing these imaginaries together! That's perhaps what offends me most about the funding distortions they're applying.

It's disingenuous for GitHub to suggest they be trusted to lead the funding ecosystem when they kick it off with these shenanigans and huge distortions :)

You can add sponsor button next to Watch/Star button [1] which supports opencollective. For example, ReactiveUI [2] repo has one.

[1] https://help.github.com/en/articles/displaying-a-sponsor-but...

[2] https://github.com/reactiveui/ReactiveUI

Thanks! I realize that :)

Interestingly, diapers.com could have legally sold their diapers as a vendor on Amazon as well.[1] That doesn't really affect the predatory nature of Amazon's steep and unsustainable 20% discount, which went away after diapers.com went under.

[1]: https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-be...

Also what is up with “These external links will take you off GitHub to pages we haven't verified, so beware.” ?

You can put links to stuff in all other places without warnings. Now ok I guess they can argue that most other places do not entail with people sending money. But why not at least keep a list of “trusted” places?

I'd wager this is more of a "cover your ass" kind of situation for GitHub.

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

[2] http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/w/page/14422685/Predictably%... "Chapter 4: The Cost of Social Norms"

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.

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.

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?

This would be nice if there was some integration between the two.

> 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.

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?

> if they really care about their users, not just getting profits?

[citation needed]

It's a for-profit company who "loves" open source and hosts a lot of it's projects. But the platform is still not open source. Go figure

Really excited for this new feature!

Would the sponsorship be a subscription model or can you also do a one time payment donation?

https://help.github.com/en/articles/sponsoring-a-developer

Will this support micro payments like $1 or even $0.10 a month? Or would credit card fees eat all that up?

Would be great if they could get Stripe on board with this and support 0 fees due to the application.

interchange fees are attributable mostly to card networks (e.g. visa) and not stripe

$1 / month is already one of the options.

1 - I can imagine sending money to every country isn't a simple deal. Which countries of residence will initially be allowed to receive (and send) payments?

2 - How a potential sponsor knows, without a lot of research, who is deserving of their sponsorship? Will this possibly cause people to change the way they contribute to OSS to make them more visible/noisy and create unhealthy competition?

Hi Devon, I posted this comment elsewhere in this thread [1], but now feel that here is a better place to write it:

It would be very 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. If you as GitHub then also reach out to the project maintainers and say "hey, there's someone who'd sponsor you", then I feel this could significantly increase the uptake of this feature on both the sponsor and the maintainer side.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19990110

This would be a nice feature, less overhead for the donator too as the amount donated can automatically be split up among all of your starred projects. Bonus points to offset a sponsor dashboard where you can use a slider to change the percentage splits. In the future a budget feature can be added for sponsored projects and this dashboard can show which projects haven't yet met their budget for the month or quarter, similar to the banners that show on wikipedia, "this is an open source project and need x amount in order to keep operations going smoothly, if everyone donates y amount that will fund development for z time period."

This dashboard could also have suggestions for sponsoring projects that you either forked or use as a dependency in your project.

If I forked a repo it’s because I was making a PR to fix something. It says nothing about whether I’m still depending on that code.

Am I using stars wrong? I have starred 771 projects on GitHub. To me, a star means anything from "I use this" to "I think this is a cool project". Giving $10 a month to 771 projects would result in about a penny for each project.

I'd rather separate starred from sponsored. If I could select a subset of that 771 and say "split $10 among these projects" then I'd be happy.

I'm in your shoes too. I've got 457 stars (and I don't think I've ever un-starred a project).

I think it'd be a reasonable default for most people to start with though.

Perhaps offering the projects that you `watch` a higher priority than those you've starred would be a fairer default?

This is interesting, but it raises questions, mainly: if a project is abandoned and you've still given it a star, does it continue to send money to it? Will it cause people to un-star projects?

I could see having some kind of "tip amount" per project that gets taken from a pool would make a lot of sense, but not as stars.

Doesn't that problem still exist though? Say you sponsor a project individually and it eventually goes unsupported. Would your sponsorship live on if you never manually cancelled it?

Using stars as a proxy for sponsorship, I think, is the wrong idea anyhow. Sponsorship should imply star, but not the inverse. I think what would be best is an easy way to sift through your starred projects and "upgrade" them to a sponsorship. Then once you've done that once, you can manage stars and sponsorships independently going forward.

They could factor in the repo's "pulse". More active projects get a bigger slice.

No, they shouldn’t, because doing that would incentivise improper activity.

How many sponsoring circles have you detected already ?

I can't believe people able to be sponsored aren't doing background stuff to make sure they get free $5K a month from github, since it's a simple as doing a reciprocal sponsoring.

Heck, anyone with a bit too much cash can just offer to be payed to sponsor, let's say you give me 1 unit, I sponsor 0,9 upon payment, you get 1,8 from github.

TL;DR : really surprised you went with matching sponsoring, aren't you worried about this, is this just cost of doing business, or are you actively detecting it ? (and how if discloseable ?)

GitHub is vetting applicants. If they do get hoodwinked, they are at least getting hoodwinked into giving money to somebody they thought was doing worthwhile work to begin with.

So your hypothesis is that they'd rather assume this potential cost for the sake of publicity ?

Also, in the "paid to sponsor" scenario they'd be hoodwinke into giving money both to someone worthwhile and someone totally unknown to them. I'd be really curious to know the technical or legal possibles responses.

The whole concept of giving away matching funds is for publicity.

That's a good point actually, I suppose it doesn't indeed really matters to them where it goes as long as they can say "we gave X to open source projects", X probably being already defined.

This is a brilliant idea whose time has come, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it plays out.

I'm especially looking forward to seeing how it plays in the corporate arena; I'd love to see businesses that depend on open source every day (that is, all of them) throwing what is just pocket change to them at projects enabling their business. I hope you're planning on encouraging this behavior!

Can an organization get sponsored instead of an individual?

Devon, as a contributor to a major open source project, this is really really awesome news. Thanks for all the hard work on it.

In lieu of helping out OSS, your CEO put out a proposal awhile back about offering desk space to contributors of OSS [0]. Is this still in consideration?

[0] - https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1103919494894772226

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Even better (imo), try to buffer one time payments over months. This (and other similar features) could allow a developer to see upcoming income from OSS, if it's declining, etc.

Being able to predict how much you're going to make it hugely helpful imo. Especially if you're a freelancer. You might see that in 3 months your funds are drying up, so plan accordingly.

Just brainstorming: But "similar features" could be trying to favor longer term donations. If a user wants to donate $20/m, maybe ask them for $10/m for 3 month increments?

Though, I suppose this isn't any better than the developer themself buffering funds in their bank. BUT, it seems like a meaningful concept, regardless.

Also there are hundreds of way to receive one time donations on the internet currently. GitHub focusing on recurring subscription makes sense.

Instead of enabling one-time donations, I see some value in sponsorships with a predetermined EOL: Instead of donating $10 one-time, get a 10-month sponsorship for $1 each and at the end of those 10 months, decide whether you want to continue supporting the developer. Github could charge you the $10 (or the interest-adjusted equivalent) up-front to decrease the transaction costs too.

This decreases the variation in the developer's income and lets them plan for the future accordingly, which is always a good thing.

nah it'd be better if you could just tip a developer, i'm more inclined to do a large one time "impulse" donation instead of a continuous drip feed

also i wouldn't want to be listed as a sponsor in case the dev wound up doing something controversial(as Opensource devs are wont to do)

Being able to vote with dollars on bug/features would be great.

Bug bounties would be amazing.

I'd drop a lot of money on a particular docker feature that hasn't been dealt with for the last 3 years running.

I only have experience in non-development creative work, but one-off payments/donations are much more anxious than monthly. Sales of t-shirts/songs/ebooks could be higher than what I get monthly on Patreon now, but:

1: I could never be sure. One month it was $0, the next it was $3, the next it was $40. This is impossible to plan around. It's even worse now with everything moving to SaaS. It's easier to justify a subscription to something like EastWest Composer Cloud or Splice when I have a bunch of people subscribing to my work who've been there for months or a year.

2: I didn't know who they were. This was fine in the good months, but then I hit long stretches with nothing coming in, and I had no idea why. Did the platform make some change? Did my products fall out of fashion? I was at the mercy of opaque storefront logic and priorities.

And I don't mean in the creepy surveillance state sense. I know most of the people subscribing to me on Patreon through Mastodon. When they unsubscribe, I know why because they tell me. I sold tens of t-shirts years ago. I've never seen someone wear one. Nobody sent me an email. Sales collapsed one day and never returned. Patreon subscribers tell me good things about my music and writing all the time.

Neither of these is 100% a problem with one-off contributions, but the level of communication never matched this.

This is my experience as well. I've done both, and made more money off one-time software sales (rather than patreon-supported OSS) but it was completely unpredictable. There are toxic outcomes from that: you start tailoring your output to what you think the market will do big numbers on, rather than what's good. Being a small business person can be brutal and it doesn't always lead to you doing good work: it can lead to very cynical exploitation of your perceived market, just to survive for another month.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Seems like it would give people the wrong idea.

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/

> 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

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.

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.

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.

>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...

How are those different exactly?

payment processing fee = pay the payment provider (Stripe, PayPal, etc.)

a cut from the payment in order to pay for their services = additional fee on top on payment processing fee to cover operational expenses, employee salaries etc.

The first scenario is a loss leader -- it doesn't contribute any revenue for the business to stay afloat.

The second may or may not be a loss leader, but it will contribute something in revenue for the business to stay afloat.

That's charitable. Nowhere do they say that their "payment processing fee" will be limited to the fees charged by their payment processor. They could very well charge some multiple of that value to generate a profit.

There is: nominal processing fee.

Credit Processing fees pay the bank/processing fees charged to Github. The Patreon “cut” pays processing fees but it also pays for Patreon’s electric bill, employee salaries, rent, profit.

Github already has the bills paid by paid GitHub accounts. So adding this is simply another feature and the only new real cost to this feature is credit card processing fees. If there are other costs (extra employees, etc.,) that could be counted as a marketing expense.

The big question is if they don't take fees then how do they match the donations? This is clearly unsustainable.

> 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?

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.

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.

A fraud conviction.

Well, that would be fraud and illegal.

Other than that, nothing. What's stopping you from conning an old lady out of her pension?

Why would it be fraud? We both contribute to open source projects and appreciate the effort that the other contributes.

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.

How do you distinguish

(A) two random developers that met each other at several conferences over the years, have contributed to a few same projects and really like the efforts the other one is putting into their OSS project

(B) two random developers that met each other at several conferences over the years, have contributed to a few same projects and want to fraud GitHub for the donation match

I think this could be a real practical problem for GitHub. And lawyering up against developers supporting the campaign potentially counteracts the marketing benefit of it.

Option (A) is the exact situation I'm envisioning.

Rather than waiting for some third party fans to give money, we'd be immediately rewarding the work that the other has done over the years with a one-off $5K (to maximize the match) contribution.

If I was GitHub, I'd make a distinction between two random people shuffling 10 bucks back and forth and two people shoving hundreds or thousands around. The first scenario is probably an accident, the second is not. Come to think of it, they probably should have capped individual contribution matching to something reasonable (maybe they'll still do that).

I'm not the other guy, but I honestly don't see an argument for why this is fraud. Is this against the terms? Can you point to a specific line in the terms forbidding this? Your argument just seems like "this is clearly fraud and you can tell by looking at it"...

Here there's an offence known as "theft by deception" which would probably cover what is effectively a conspiracy to do so.

When joining the waitlist, they ask about a variety of open source projects you've been involved in. I imagine they'll vet what kind of contribution level people did on different repos they claim, or just on open source repos in general.

If Github aren't doing KYC and AML, then their payment processor better have. Otherwise this is the swiftest way I've seen to make $5K.

KYC: know your customer.

AML: anti money-laundering.

Basics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_laundering

Epic Games is doing stuff like this in order to own the concept of a video-game storefront. I don't think Microsoft would go quite so far as to subsidize massive fraud just to get people engaged with this scenario, but they're clearly prepared to throw some money at it.

"me", I mean "another github user", I mean "anyone on the internet who wants to create a github account & start cashing in."

This feature really makes no sense, either they figure the fraud will be low enough to not matter, or there's some oversight mechanism to prevent it. I am certain they don't want to try to sue ten thousand random people to attempt to claw back $5k each. I imagine there's some flag/approval process.

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.

> Maybe that is good.

How is that good?

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.

I'd expect it to get worse. People pay for features over maintenance even more strongly than they allocate prestige.

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.

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

It appears they leverage Bountysource (not familiar with it).

You can describe any software that way.

Big new headline features are a marketers wet dream.

"We fixed that annoying bug that affected 4 people last year" not so much.

Also, "driving for uber" is hardly a great thing to aspire to.

In my line of work there are perverse incentives for hyping up new stuff and then not dealing with bugs and problems. It's not been me doing that but I've suffered by comparison against others who embraced that dark pattern.

Complaints are publicity. They bump internet discussions, create buzz, and often go along with protestations of 'I really love (FooBazBar), I promise it's the best thing ever, now if you would only fix this bug…' and then angry flames over the bugs and defenders coming to protect the honor of FooBazBar.

Fix bugs and people are happy and stop talking. They return to happily using the product. Again, we're talking perverse incentives for just the sort of obnoxious behavior you describe, or worse.

a lot of abandoned project will get revived

> 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.

Is that a future we want? I would much rather work towards a future where everyone makes enough at their day job and can work on passion projects on the side.

Why are we okay with the idea that in order to get by, we should have to do work in our supposed off time as well? Uber/etc love to bring up the fact that it's often their drivers' second job, as a defense of their independent contractor status and pay. Which is, to me, a pretty damning indictment of how we've structured our society.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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?

LOL! I think you might be a tad overstating the significance of this.

Yes, nice to have the key people working on open source in Bill Gates pocket. Isn't this what the open source communtiy have been dreaming about all along..

Cynisism aside I get where you are comming from. As somone doing OS fulltime I applaud the effort. I guess it is to much to ask to have a source of income completely without bias.

This is a sad commentary on software development as a profession, as well as society as well. A watershed moment is when private individuals might be able to get paid for the extremely valuable work that they do that allows thousands of companies to make a profit with some companies becoming worth billions. The fact that the ability to socially beg for money for valuable software makes the idea of writing valuable software more viable is a sad state of affairs.

What's the line between patronage and just hiring someone outright for a pet project?

Dignity.

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-incom...

Tidelift is also supported via the new GitHub Sponsors feature: 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).

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.

This... seems pessimistic and overly dramatized.

Agreed. Conjunction fallacy galore in parent post.

And self-indulgent.

Hopefully it will balance out the crazy optimism so many other posters are having over this announcement because they think they'll make money off of it.

Unfortunately due to the death of net neutrality, you find wherever you host your repository, there's more latency and network dropouts, and if you want to share your code only users with "Full Access" tiers at their ISP can view it - all the poor people on the cheap "Basics" accounts are stuck with a generic set of "Inclusions" which don't include your personal hosting choices.

Dejected, you try and start a grass roots movement to open up the internet again, but due to the illegality of encryption the algorithms know and detect the subtle shifts in your social graph and semantic changes in demeanour. Late one evening, you hear a knock on your door. No one is there when you answer it, but you look down to see a small paper envelope. A quaint anachronism.

Inside are photos of your friends and family at home, at work, dropping their kids at school. You turn to the last photo and it's a frame from a webcam - your webcam. A small picture-in-picture overlay shows a particularly disturbing frame from an illegal porno. You don't recognise it, and you were always careful to cover up your camera for "personal" time, so you suspect a deep fake.

Your phone vibrates. A notification from the bank: "Your account is overdrawn." Your life savings are gone. Your phone vibrates again. This time it's a message. "This is your only warning. If you continue to fight the system, it will destroy you." You swipe to see who sent the message, but suddenly the screen goes black and your phone refuses to reboot.

The sun is coming up now. A flock of android sheep swoop through the air, bleating electronically. You drop the envelope and its contents in the nearest recycling bin, step to the edge of your cloud-home, and cast your body to the mercy of the under-dwellers far below.

I would need data to concede that javascript required makes gitlab DOA for devs. Or, that they wouldn't enable javascript to write code.

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

I would absolutely sponsor issue's. It'd be a great way to lure people into a longer term sponsorship.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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).

Using Github as a git repo hoster is okayish in the sense that it does not lock your code in. Using Github as a central management tool is problematic, but still manageable.

But this introduces money into the game, and it's dangerous. Github will be the gatekeeper for money flows. It's the same for Patreon, but Patreon has less incentives to lock the whole Open Source ecosystem into their products (Github: hosting, code, issues, PRs, pages with CNAMEs!, package registry and now financial transactions).

My bet is that due to the current state of the ecosystem, people will jump on it and forget that Microsoft is behind all of this. We need organisations which are forced to be open and collective to handle Open Source, not privately owned corporate.

(I made this comment in another Github related post, but to repeat:)

If you view Github as just a Git (and occasionally static site) hosting service, then there's not lock-in whatsover; you can always move to somewhere like Gitlab or host your own. But the point is: Github isn't just a Git website anymore; it creates a community around it. Right now the reason why people aren't easily moving out of Github is because by moving to somewhere else, they have to risk getting less views, less recognition, and less pull requests for their libraries. Also, if you were a Sponsor in Github and earning $30000 a month and then had disagreements with Github's policies and want to get out, you now have to risk shaving off all your sponsors to switch to a different service like Liberapay. Maybe some of your passionate existing patrons will go towards the extra effort to switch alongside you, but the reality is: most won't.

There were lots of promises and hopes for the patron economy (or I would extend this to call it a "distributed economy"), where people can directly give money as reward for their work while avoiding the traditional hierarchical structure of corporations. However, because of the nature of the current society we live in, the ideal version of this economy would never come to fruition. Think of examples such as Patreon, Youtube, and recently Github; they're an enabler for diverse communities, rich subcultures, and innovative ideas, but the users still have to live under the guise of huge capitalistic forces. It seems that the distributed economy still has to live under the current technocratic system (where huge tech corporations have much higher leverage than small companies or non-profit organizations). To see this relationship between users and corporations as either symbiotic or exploitative is up to your choice, but I think the status-quo will stay for quite some time.

I would really like to say that Microsoft is currently infiltrating the OSS world and pursuing their strategy, which they have successfully implemented dozens of times. Does anyone remember EEE[0]? If this is the case here, it would be the greatest successful coup in the history of the Internet.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_Extend_and_Extinguish

Wrote the same in another comment.. it's kinda brilliant but sad to watch at the same time. Microsoft's Github guys are geniuses if this is a part of a long-running EEE strategy. And people fall for it, because they have no principles and values, on which they decide what's good or damaging for Open Source.

Embrace and extend makes sense. But wrt the open source world, how does extinguish fit in?

Get developers locked in to a centralized ecosystem like GitHub, spread the marketing far and wide you use tools based on centralized platforms, encourage developers to utilize frameworks and programming languages that have poor support for open source platforms, etc.

I agree.

All the recent additions to Github are superficially very nice and convenient features (Actions, package registry, Sponsors, Dependabot).

But they represent a very significant change in mindset. Github is turning from a neutral code hosting platform with a myriad of equally empowered third party integrations into the direction of a "all in one" dev tool and platform.

I understand the internal pressures to do this: increased popularity, added value proposition for customers, more revenue.

But: all the built-in tools will have an inherent advantage over third party solutions. This also inevitably leads to increased lock-in and homogenization.

I was very critical of the Microsoft acquisition for similar reasons, and considering the monumental role Github represents for open source today, I am very sceptical of the way things are going.

We might very well regret centralizing everything open source around Github in a few years.

I wrote something about the pattern of centralization/decentralization in the context of Patreon: https://kyefox.com/patreons-future-venture-capital-is-bad-an...

GitHub is somewhere between 2 and 3 right now.

> they decide to build their own closed-source platform

How does it matter that the donation platform is closed-source? Open market principles still apply. People will (and should) use it as long as it's easy, efficient, cheap to donate to whoever you wish to donate. If the platform misuses their dominance, people will figure out and alternatives will emerge/thrive. Until then, why complicate things? Donation is not like a lock-in into some closed source technology.

Again, I'm biased but here comes my biased thoughts anyways:

> How does it matter that the donation platform is closed-source?

Yes, I do think it does matter. Actually, I think that every open source service we open source developers depend on, should be open source and run in the open as much as possible.

It's great if a for-profit company can survive being 100% transparent and with all code open source. So far, that's been very difficult to achieve, especially with the expectations from VC funding and high-growth startups.

So instead, we need a different model for open source infrastructure, where the users are more involved in the funding of the platform. With that, users should feel they know what the money goes to and where it comes from. To solve that, the platform needs transparency.

So yes, I'd argue that a core open source platform for open source developers, indeed needs to be open source and transparent.

> So instead, we need a different model for open source infrastructure, where the users are more involved in the funding of the platform. With that, users should feel they know what the money goes to and where it comes from. To solve that, the platform needs transparency.

I am myself a proponent of open source, but I don’t think it is reasonable to expect that this is going to happen.

Who contributes to open source?

To my knowledge, open source contributors can be divided into the following groups:

- People volunteering their own time.

- Companies open sourcing software they themselves developed, bought the rights to or got the rights to through aquiring another company.

- Companies contributing their bug fixes and feature additions to existing open source software. (Sometimes overlaps with previous group, sometimes not.)

- Non-profit organizations.

- People employed by educational institutions.

- Governmental institutions.

And the motivations that these groups have for contributing to open source vary wildly. Both from group to group but also within each of the groups as well.

Some of the possible motivations include:

- Believing in the ideals of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

- Wanting to share cool stuff.

- Wanting to help others learn.

- Wanting to empower your fellow developers.

- Wanting to be empowered and in control of the software you run. Wanting freedom. Wanting to be able to run your software for any purpose and wanting to be able to modify your software in any way. Wanting to be able to run the software that you use today, tomorrow. Wanting to be in control of your data.

- Wanting to learn from others.

- Wanting to offer consulting other other paid services for people using your open source software, software that you contribute to, or software that you are skilled at using, modifying or integrating.

- Wanting the improvements that others outside of your company could bring to your software by you open sourcing it.

- Wanting to use existing, battle-tested open source software where you can instead of duplicating work and wasting hours while putting you at a competitive disadvantage compared to other businesses that make use of open source instead of needlessly reinventing the wheel.

- Wanting recognition from your peers.

And a million other motivations probably exist as well, but the ones I mentioned are the most obvious ones I can think of.

Given the list above, I think you will agree that a lot of the people involved in open source have no reason or motivation to reject the ongoing centralization.

Only if Microsoft does something with GitHub that has visibly negative effects on the specific motivations that someone has for contributing to open source will that person or group of people object.

My point is: Open source as a whole is moving in a direction counter to the one desired by some, such as yourself. For others it might not yet. And for yet others it might never. It all depends on why the person or the group of people is in open source in the first place.

An integrated payment solution is going to attract a far greater numbers of sponsors than telling everyone to go to sign up for a subscription on external sites.

Integrated authentication, existing credit cards on file, unified billing, giving more visibility to sponsors, allow projects to effectively monetize high traffic project pages with ad-space for sponsors and potential benefits like priority support is going to have a far larger impact for incentivizing funding and sponsorship than linking to a number of different external sites off to the side.

I'm sure this is a welcome and long awaited feature for many devs who would love more funding around their OSS efforts.

> An integrated payment solution is going to attract a far greater numbers of sponsors than telling everyone to go to sign up for a subscription on external sites.

I agree, and I'm not saying GitHub should have just added a redirect to OpenCollective and called it a day.

But they did have the choice to integrate OpenCollective. Basically, the same UI they have now, they could have built on top of OpenCollective, without any losses of features. But, they would have lost a lot of data and other interesting things that can help GitHub/Microsoft develop other features in other services.

And I'm sure it was a conversation on the product team (or whoever came up with it), but eventually got dropped for for some reason.

Why would they limit themselves to the features of integrating multiple external sites when they can build the features, integration, velocity and product direction they want without being beholden to external stake holders with different values and motivations.

GitHub's effectively the home of OSS development, with great UX and design aesthetics, they definitely don't need to delegate for help in building out their own product.

The only stake holders who would benefit by redirecting to external sites, are the external providers themselves as it would end up with a worse UX and fragmented and limited experience, which is exactly what you don't when wanting to attract sponsorship, it should be as easy, seamless and integrated as possible.

Microsoft have two choices with the direction of GitHub:

Use it as a loss-leader to get developer mindshare and get more people to use what they actually get a profit from, Azure and others.

Or, they can use GitHub to build a open platform for the entire ecosystem.

What of these two options are the best for users of the platform? I'm sure one option is better for the shareholders of Microsoft/GitHub, but I'm more interested in the value for the users, many who are open source developers.

Of course, they don't have to collaborate with the rest of the ecosystem. But if they were truly interested in making the open source ecosystem better, without any compromises, they would have built something different than what was launched today.

> The only stake holders who would benefit by redirecting to external sites, are the external providers themselves

Sure, if you think of it as OpenCollective vs GitHub. But in the end, open source developers are the ones who should be benefiting from whatever choice they make (that's my naive hope at least). And the choice they made was to improve short-term mindshare, in front of long-term open source sustainability.

For me, GitHub have become an essential open source infrastructure project. But, the platform itself is nowhere near open, and every new feature they seem to be launching, is closed-source and _aims_ to fracture the existing ecosystems the feature touches.

> Use it as a loss-leader to get developer mindshare

Right, that's why they paid 7.5B to acquire GitHub and are further investing in it to be more appealing to developers and gain even more mind share.

> Or, they can use GitHub to build a open platform for the entire ecosystem.

Is that code for not shipping developer focused features they've released since acquiring GitHub? Most of the features like free private repos and package repositories have been well received.

> What of these two options are the best for users of the platform?

For users, definitely all the features they're taking advantage of now that didn't exist before.

> Sure, if you think of it as OpenCollective vs GitHub.

I'm purely viewing it from the developer's perspective on what would attract more funding/sponsorship, which is by far the more convenient and integrated solution for all reasons already mentioned in my previous comments above.

I view this as a massive potential that could spur on a whole new wave of sustainable OSS development similar to what YouTube/Twitch are doing for content creators. This was never a consideration of GitHub before but with this announcement it's now become a strategic focus which I hope will be continually improved on over time.

Perhaps this is all a ploy to encourage us to get our credit cards on file with Github? They don't have my card details, and I don't intend to change that. I'll look for other means to donate to the open source projects I want to support, but it does not involve giving Microsoft Github my bank account details.

Does Github and Microsoft have a habit of stealing money from people? I’d be more worried about giving my info to some random open source “collective” group that has considerably less experience with compliance and security.

The down votes you have should indicate the general opinion here, but;

Microsoft's takeover of GitHub is generally considered in the open source community as a negative.

After all, Microsoft's behaviour indicates a generally opposing ideology.

With regards privacy, Microsoft is up there with the worst of them (a la Facebook) with their telemetry, at the very least.

Beyond that, Microsoft has a ( perhaps rightly so) capitalist agenda which doesn't fit with open source.

In case you missed the mass exodus from GitHub on the announcement of their takeover, those that value the freedoms of Libre generally are not in favour of a Microsoft GitHub.

Giving GitHub your bank details can be reasonably synonymised with giving Microsoft your bank details and giving them a cut of the money you intended to give to a developer.

At this point, all the additions to GitHub that Microsoft are making, demonstrate how disconnected they are from that community.

Alternatives such as open collective are quite well regarded in this community and their ideology aligns like Microsoft's never will.

Worse comes to worse, you can ask a developer for a PayPal, Bitcoin or plain old bank details and just send money straight you them.

I'm not saying there are not those for whom this will be of value, but GitHub as-was is no more and ideally if some neutral party willing to host an open source, libre alternative were to show themselves, or would be more desirable than a Microsoft GitHub, for this community.

To present my anecdotal example; I don't run Windows, I don't have an Xbox, I don't have my bank details in GitHub; Microsoft is up in the top-list of companies that don't (willingly) get my bank details.

I'm not sure what OP is complaining about. From GitHub's announcement it's clear that there's also a new functionality to make it easy for projects to link to whatever funding platform they use. Open Collective is mentioned specifically:

> Open source projects can also express their funding models directly from their repositories. When .github/FUNDING.yml is added to a project’s master branch, a new “Sponsor” button will appear at the top of the repository. Clicking the button opens a natively rendered view of the funding models listed in that file.

> The YAML format is flexible, so a project’s maintainers and contributors can decide how they want to fund the project on their own terms. They can showcase any (or all!) of the following: the GitHub Sponsors profiles of the developers who contribute to the project; a list of popular funding models including Open Collective, Community Bridge, Tidelift, Ko-fi, and Patreon; and custom links to alternative funding models.

From https://github.blog/2019-05-23-announcing-github-sponsors-a-....

I'm complaining about that this feature is not trying to improve the ecosystem long-term for open source developers.

It's great that you can now have a fancier link to OpenCollective. Thank you for that, Githubbers who are reading the HN comments. But it feels like smoke-and-mirrors.

The real announcement is the other, built-in funding platform they built. Which, if they wanted to, could have been built entirely on something open, instead of their own stuff. There is no special features that for example OpenCollective does not already have.

Instead they (not surprisingly) continue to walk down the path of closed platforms, while cheering for open source.

> It's great that you can now have a fancier link to OpenCollective. Thank you for that, Githubbers who are reading the HN comments.

It improves discoverability, which is important enough that it's a big part of why people use GitHub. It might just be me, but that seems like it might benefit open source developers no matter what platform they use.

In the short-term, I think a lot of open source developers will get funding, who might not have gotten it otherwise. But I'm not too optimistic of a future where GitHub, as a closed platform, basically owns open source.

Copying from another comment I made:

> 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.

This would be something great for GitLab to jump on. A bit reactionary, but would be great for them to show support for a more open payment system.

That's a great idea! GitLab implementing native support for OpenCollective or similar would raise the bar significantly.

Totally agree! And it's already being discussed, here's the issue with more details about it https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/43468

> 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.

GitHub's code has always been closed source. It's a service, not software. It's been like that since day one.

Exactly. Always been like that and probably will always be like that.

But still, we as open source developers, use and basically at this point, need to have GitHub still up and running. But they are at the whims of profit. GitHub is today a critical piece of open source infrastructure most of us rely on.

Microsoft say they care about open source developers and now they are running the biggest platform for open source developers. They have the chance to turn GitHub into something that is not a profit-hungry monster, but they don't seem to want to go that route.

Because Microsoft is a profit-hungry monster and their "adoption" of open source was the only way they could stay alive longer. It never had to do with doing what is good for humanity.

I'm not saying "open development" is not important but your message reads like its dismissive of people with different goals.

I'm a developer, I might create some tool for my needs and share it with others. I've got other income sources so there's no need for me to charge money for it. I just put it on GitHub as the easiest thing I can do to allow others benefit from it.

In some sense I would be open source developer. I don't care about "open development" though, I don't spend time pondering about software philosophy and its place in the world.

If there's a will to donate some money to me so I can justify spending some more time on the tool to make it more accessible in any way then I want the simplest way for both sides to facilitate the transaction.

Same goes for me being on the other side. I see a library I'd like to use, I believe author(s) made a good job, I'd like the library to be maintained, I want to pay for that with as little traction as possible. I don't care if the author created the library because he believes in "free software" or was simply bored and again, GitHub was the most convenient channel to share.

The same way I don't care what philosophy lies beneath music producer's work and what tools do we use while I'm paying him for his tutorials as long as it works for both of us.

That's fine and all. I'm not really involved in that side of things (consuming/producing open source libraries) and I think that side of open source is working fine, albeit it could be better (like most things).

What I'm mainly thinking about, is the running infrastructure. The live servers that are serving requests and providing a service to open source developers.

Some of these services are just nice to have.

Others are services we 100% depend on to get anything done nowadays.

The npm Inc registry is a good example. Imagine that the registry disappears tomorrow. Probably most JS developers would struggle until a alternative becomes clear and most people migrate there.

But just having the risk of having for-profit companies run these pieces of critical open source infrastructure, is a big risk for me as a open source developer.

This open source infrastructure is what I'm scared about, because we basically have no good solutions yet, for running open source infrastructure.

I understand that and that's why I haven't said there's anything wrong with your opinion or that I disagree.

Yes, we'd all love to have our tools (repository, package hosting, CIs, ...) both satisfying our needs and be free of whims of for-profit companies.

Some of us simply don't care that much as long as what we have now works and I just wanted to append that to the conversation.

That's why I only said that your message reads like... and not assumed you really believe the service is bad in overall just because it's bad within scope of one aspect that's close to your heart. :)

Thanks for clarifying! I do understand what you mean and agree as well.

In the end, different people will have different priorities :)

The problem here is not so much about open vs closed-source. GitHub is a large centralized social network controlled by corporation, and we should never expect a corporation to behave ethically because ethics too often contradict with commercial interests. There is so much possibility for abuse, they do censorship and there are ways in which they can discriminate against certain projects and licenses and promote others. Even if Microsoft or previous owners have not done anything bad with GitHub yet, it does not mean it is acceptable to give so much control and influence over the open-source community to a single commercial company.

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-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."

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

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?

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.

> every aspect of Patreon is bad for creators

Why? What do you mean exactly?

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.

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.

What's stopping me creating a sponsored project and donating myself $5,000 to get a free $5,000?

Microsoft's lawyers?

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 :).

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.

Well the IRS would have something to say about it for sure, i doubt github would hide the transactions from them...

Interestingly enough, Microsoft sponsored issues using GitCoin and paid out bounties in Dai.

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-...

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/

> doesn't work well for Patreon and others

What do you mean? What's wrong with Patreon?

"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-patre...

It's a bit mind blowing to think that Patreon is 300 employees. What are they all doing?

I wonder that too. Liberapay is just as capable open platform being run by like 10 people, right?

Like most VC-funded startups, they have a huge staff of people whose job it is to promote Patreon and manage larger accounts.

> 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.

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?

They made some recent changes meant to address this: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/360024952552-N...

Whether or not it'll work is an open question.

I'd be tempted to sign up and just donate $5k to myself to get the 100% match.... #freemoney

Well then you’d be stealing...that’s a real downside to me.

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.

A one time contribution would be great - since I personally cannot afford sponsoring monthly.

I think that you can set it up, and cancel it after one month. It's just a simple click.

I’m excited about this but fearful that it will create unfair (I.e. monetary) incentive structures for FOSS maintenance.

Monetary == unfair? Why?

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.

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?

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)

Won't a restrictive license mean fewer users, and thus fewer sponsors?

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

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.

GitLab actually has an open source SCM that you can selfhost.

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.

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://sigma.eruditenow.com

* had I been the kind of person who have enemies

If I click on any of the actual sponsor buttons it redirects to https://github.com/users/$user/sponsorship and 404's. Happening for anybody else?

happens for me too

> 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?

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?

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.

This is the best thing to have happened to open source since GitHub has launched. Thank you to whomever has internally pushed for it!

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

Leave it to Microsoft to finally figure out a way to get people and more importantly businesses to fund OSS work.

* 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.

WSL is absolutely terrible and can't be taken seriously.

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?

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.

Microsoft has really become "less evil" in the last couple of years.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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_abo...

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

otoh, sponsoring developers avoids the friction between teams about how to share sponsorships etc. they should offer both though

No, it gives the owners of the team/org the ability to distribute funds as they wish. There should be no friction.

From the signup page :

> What are your preferred pronouns? (optional)

So this is actually happening ?

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.

it's great right?

Great to see GitHub is finally introducing a direct way to support OSS developers.

Try IssueHunt (https://issuehunt.io/) as well! A open-source bounty platform for open source. Great place for open source developers to earn extra cash!

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.

@Github/Microsoft feature request:

It would be nice to see sponsorship or bounties for individual issues in Github.

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.

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?

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-...

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-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.

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.

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?

Makes sense to scale a product slowly.

I guess because it is still in limited beta. Pretty sure it's gonna open for everyone in the future.

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.

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..

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect

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.

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

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.

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`.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

$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.

So it appears users can choose their own levels, I do wonder what the minimum is.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

GitHub is really on a roll lately. Another long awaited feature, if a little late.

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.

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.

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).

Damn! This is surely an amazing QoL feature. Well done.

Can i just give myself $5K and get the matched $5K?

Anyone has any idea how thiswill work for EU residents? Will we be paying the outrageous US 30% tax and local taxes too?

Double taxation prevention treaties will do their jobs. US should have one with EU.

That's how Microsoft plans to monetize GitHub? Not bad....

For a decentralized alternative, see Gitcoin, currently used especially by projects in and around the Ethereum space: https://gitcoin.co/

Is this GitHub's version of a GitCoin competitor?

Microsoft is gonna centralize the sh*t out of the eco-system. Let's see how it goes this time.

To be fair, it's us who created this problem, not Microsoft. GitHub was too central long before Microsoft acquired it.

Your move GitLab!

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.

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-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.

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!

$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.

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.

> 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.

This has been my experience, too. I suspect it has to do with how budgets are allocated.

A large expenditure request follows a different path and will probably get seriously examined and specially budgeted for.

A small one only needs the approval of the department manager, and it will come directly out of the budget that's already been allocated. This means that it is an expense that manager will actually feel, and is more likely to simply be denied.

Fully agree with that. And that's why I love github that much. I got two sponsors from github-as-official-company already. It's apparently easy there to get that microbudget approved.

I expect this to be a loss leader for them, rather than something they're planning to monetize. So they can probably run it with pretty minimal fees

Minimal fees would be something like 20% if it's going to be big enough to be a watershed moment.

Who’s making a living on Patreon? The same people who make a living on Kickstarter, or via “gift” transfers through PayPal (before that was clamped down upon): people who can pull in whale patrons/backers.

Certain verticals have more whale patrons than others. The common story is that if you’re an artist and you want to go where the whale patrons are, that’s—for some reason—art targeting the furry subculture. That’s as true for patronage as it is for doing commissions.

It’s unlikely that you can just do what you’re doing and make a living off of Patreon; but if you want to shape what you’re doing based off of what will attract wealthy patrons, it’s pretty easy to find niches where your skills will translate to dollars.

I patronize several people who literally make their living on Patreon (and YouTube), and it doesn't look like "whales" are necessary. Take LGR: currently making just over $6k/mo on pateron which is $72k/year, or $68k with an assumed 5% cut for Patreon. Depending on where you live that's already a reasonable income for a single person household, and he presumably makes some YouTube money on top of that. That money comes from 2808 patrons, making an average contribution of just over $2 each.

You're unlikely to make a fortune on Pateron without "whales" but a living can be had if you can build a decent audience. Though, that isn't out of line with the "It’s unlikely that you can just do what you’re doing and make a living off of Patreon" sentiment at all, as LGR puts a lot of work into his videos.

If you already have a million YouTube subscribers (LGR apparently has 1.3MM), you can certainly translate that fanbase into patronage, vis. “wealth by a thousand cuts.” There’s existing, pent-up demand (guilt?) to give you money for all the stuff you’ve already provided for free.

But if you’re that much of an “influencer” already, with that large an audience, then you’re likely already making money off of ads run on your content, and you’re likely already being offered plenty of sponsorship opportunities that you could take advantage of in place of—or alongside—pursuing patronage. (At a certain size, you even get offered to just have your name stuck on products as a brand. I know there are a good number of beauty and fashion “influencers” who end up—with no more effort than signing a contract—getting beauty/fashion products co-branded, and make royalties off of that.)

I’m more talking about what you have to do to make money off of Patreon if you aren’t starting with a built-in audience of potential subscribers. If you want to build that audience, directly through Patreon (i.e. via word-of-mouth of your subscribers, with no public presence), then you need whales, and you need a niche. It becomes something very similar to making money off of commissions, except that you can make more than a 100% return on any particular commission, relative to what you’d have made if you just did it as a work-to-order for the person who suggested it.

I'm a YouTuber in the IT field. Nearly 20 million views in all, 40,000 students on Udemy and 122,000 subscribers. Anecdotal, but I don't mess with Patreon, it doesn't work for me.

You are right about the sponsorships, ad's, affiliates and merch deals being where the money is for YouTubers.

Curious what is your yearly income?

I honestly can't release that. I have a full time software engineering job. I do pretty well for a 37 year old college dropout.

We are ignoring something between whales and normal people. I believe the $2 trend is due to the expectation of subscription services. People see $2 as a reasonable exchange of what Netflix or Spotify would charge (for an individual show).

Average patrons might be willing to donate $100 a year if they understood they were allowing art or research to exist instead of just paying for market-rate viewership. This type of donation would allow 1,000 dedicated followers to support a niche cause instead of the lowest common denominator stuff creators like Pewdiepie has to put out to amass millions of fans.

I was friends in high school with someone who now makes a full-time income from Patreon. It absolutely can be done.

That said, it isn't their only source of income. They do live shows all around the world, in-person meetups (also around the world), sell books & DVDs and manage an online store. They work extremely hard, travel a lot & are extremely passionate about what they do.

[I have no special insight into their success, but I would guess that mastering social skills and relentlessly doing in-person meetups & meeting people after shows is part of it. They are definitely not hiding behind a laptop keyboard. I know I'm personally more likely to support a musician I've met and have a personal connection with.]

Super curious to learn more about the lucrative furry art niche and how you came across it.

Surprised no one else has mentioned this part of the comment.

Probably a furry or substantially furry-adjacent. We are legion.

"Furries make the internets go", as the saying goes. I've met more furries accidentally through software and infosec projects than through anything else, to the point that I don't really bother separating it from my professional identity anymore.

>> "that’s—for some reason—art targeting the furry subculture."

Furry has a lot of people in well-compensated jobs who don't go for the trappings usually associated with having lots of money. So they spend thousands on commissions and conventions instead of gadgets.

I think that's the case with most of my own patrons. They'd rather spend $1/3/5 on some unusual music or reading new pulpy adventures instead of blowing it on something disposable.

Patreon only takes a 5% cut.

That's unsustainable. Patreon is trying to increase their cut. Currently their recommended plan is at 8%: https://www.patreon.com/product/pricing

They make it look like the extra 3% is to build features for their platform, but the VC funding is for that, and other than developing the feature, having tiers doesn't cost them anything. Charging 8% just makes it a bit closer to being sustainable.

How is that unsustainable? What are they spending that money on?

Isn't it only unsustainable for VCs who want 10e50% growth ever three days?

It's unsustainable for handling small payments. Things like fraud detection, customer support, legal and financial services, and credit card chargebacks add up to more than 5%, if it's truly crowdfunding (lots of small contributions). There's a lot of failed startups in the crowdfunding space.

5% is their cut after payment processing, which is another 3% or 5% extra (depending on the size of payment, with smaller payments being more expensive to process).

For a $1 payment, they actually take 20% (10c + 5% + 5%).

I'm aware of that, which is why I didn't mention it in my list. It's about what Stripe charges. The micropayment rate of 5% is effectively lower because its per-transaction fee is $0.10 rather than $0.30. A $3.00 donation would have a $0.25 fee and a $3.01 donation would have a $0.39 fee.

> All of these have been mixed blessings. Here's an article about how Patreon doesn't work out even when everything goes smoothly

Sure, all experiences are not positive, especially when you view it through a micro lens. But if you view this through a macro lens on software development in general, just as if you view YouTube content producer monetization on consumable video at an industry level, you'll find that non-traditional financial monetization of these digital efforts has a significant impact on what was there previously.

Perhaps that person's content just wasn't very good. Just because it took a lot of work doesn't make it quality worth paying for. The individual failed at creating a travel blog capable of financial support.

"My dog is very cute, so I figured I should capitalize on that." Then the person launches into a rather simplistic rant about how patronage used to work.

"I was a freelance photographer in Chicago" Yep and so is every third person in Chicago.

I think that whole article is a pretty shallow take, accusing Patreon of things that are not Patreon's fault (and I say this as someone who thinks Patreon is shady).

Yes, people who make some stuff that takes a lot of time and effort might not get a lot of money on Patreon. But you know what? They're doing what everybody else is doing.

I feel that nowadays everything want to think of themselves as "creators". They'll create a few photos, some drawings, put it out there, and expect to get paid.

Maybe it's just my 3rd-world-country upbringing, but I think that's a BS expectation. Real world living is tougher than that; the online public is already drowning in "creative" content, and producing more of the same is not going to give you an income.

Some of these people might be pretty talented, but that's not enough. If you're simply doing what everybody is doing and bringing nothing of actual value to your sponsors, there's not much you'll get back. Spending 16 hours a day doing basket weaving and posting it on YouTube is not worth much.

This is a similar picture of what happens on Twitch, or Instagram. Everybody thinks they can be a successful streamer, or an influencer. The reality is, just a tiny percentage of people make money doing that, either by sheer luck, some almighty external influence, or because of a niche interest they seem to fill. This is not Twitch, or Instagram's fault either.

I applaud GitHub because this is a way for people to almost passively support developers they want to. I know there's plenty of devs whom I've benefitted from their work. I'd loved to have a way to support them, even if just a little bit.

I don't think most devs would expect to become professional-code-warriors-for-sponsors. That's the wrong rabbit to _chase_. But having a bit of an extra income for a beer or tea or two on some OS project they work on is nice.

I agree with your entire post, with one exception. I think you would be shocked at the world-wide potential audience for live streamed basket weaving. See: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-chinese-f...

I jumped right into that, didn't it? Goes to show my ignorance about the world of basket-weaving and its aficionados, and what I consider to be "niche". I'll need to adjust my examples in the future...

Thanks for pointing that out!

You're kind of agreeing with them though aren't you? It might seem like a really useful feature but, like Patreon, it might not be worth the time and effort for anyone.

You're just a lot more focussed on making us all believe it's the persons fault somehow.

"You're just a lot more focussed on making us all believe it's the persons fault somehow."

Fault is awfully subjective so I'll leave that be. It is definitely their responsibility, though.

I've got a family friend currently making some dangerously stupid business decisions, where the best-case upside is that they'll make minimum wage or so, and the realistic worse case is bankruptcy and losing everything they've made in the past several years and dealing with the resulting financial fallout, when they have numerous other alternatives available including sticking to their ~$20/hr skilled job with decent career prospects and good long-term security. (I don't object to the risk itself; I object to taking for a max payoff worse than their current position. I'll also add to forstall the usual HN comments that this isn't being done for any other of the reasons that people around here might still make that decision; not a whisper of "being your own boss" or anything like that.)

There's no Silicon Valley whipping horses in this story, this is just plain ol' fashioned "not understanding business", or "not allowing your comprehension of the monetary situation to penetrate down to the actions you choose to make". Is it their fault? Oh, I can make all kinds of excuses for why that's not the case; there's all kinds of personal drama I'm not laying out here driving these decisions that I can deflect with.

But is it their responsibility? Yes, and there's nothing anybody can particularly do about that. Their name on the relevant mortgage. Their name on the relevant papers. Their credit score on the line.

It's your responsibility to make business decisions sensible enough to accomplish your life's goals, and there's just not much that can be done about that.

> There's no Silicon Valley whipping horses in this story

When Patreon says this to the press: "Finally, ‘starving’ and ‘artist’ no longer need to be joined at the hip"

...they're inviting scrutiny.

There's nothing wrong about setting that target, it just is really outlandish. If that motivates them, good for them. But there are millions of starving artists, and a company that makes a serious dent in that problem would have to be enormous.

The difference here is that companies are already paying GitHub to host private repos, so it's part of their monthly payment flow. With simple nudges toward sponsorship, many companies will chuck in an extra few bucks toward the projects that they build their codebase on top of.

No they won't.

I, and a lot of other people, cannot get accounting at where I work to cut a check for that kind of sponsorship. I can get accounting to cut checks for things that matter. Typically if someone asks what's the difference between paid and free, and you answer, it supports Active Directory, you're most of the way there if you can show a business need for the product. But just a straight-up donation? It's a hard sell.

It's only a hard sell if you have to run it by accounting. But this is the kind of thing that I would have happily just expensed. It's a known vendor, and if I'm dropping $20/month on some vague software expense, nobody will care.

Note also that the product lets people "choose from multiple sponsorship tiers, with monthly payment amounts and benefits that are set by the sponsored developer." That opens up much bigger pots of money. E.g., a premium support tier is totally justifiable for software that I'm building key code on. That could be $25-100/month, no problem.

And there's a reason conferences sell sponsorships: lots of businesses see it as good marketing to support things that are visible and important to a community. For example, I could totally justify a big-dollar project sponsorship ($1k-5k/year) as a recruiting expense if I want to hire people who already know something important to our work.

> It's a known vendor, and if I'm dropping $20/month on some vague software expense, nobody will care.

If you said the money is going to GitHub, and it's actually going through GitHub, that's lying.

I think it will probably show up differently on credit card statements anyway, so people won't be tempted to do this behind the backs of the accounting department.

Could you imagine getting audited and your boss finding out you donated $xxxx dollars in donated patronage to others? I would not want to be the one in that room...

As with any expense, you should have a good business reason for it. But I think there's a strong business case for businesses supporting open source software that's key to that business.

Either way, it's $20 on some vague software expense. Nobody will care. Worst case, the boss somehow says, "What's this $20 charge" and I explain why I though there was a good business reason for us to support that project.

You're thinking in terms of this first announcement (large sponsorships). I'm thinking about the next step in the process, which is more like Patreon.

GitHub will know two very interesting data points: the relationship graph between projects and dependencies and the sponsorship level of those dependencies. Combine that with Issue and PR activity, and it could therefore identify which highly-depended-upon projects need funds the most and nudge accordingly.

"Did you know that you and 2,500 other codebases depend on $lib.js? Why not pledge $25 to support its development?" That sort of thing.

Exactly. I was looking a creating a business that was something like Patreon for open source devs. Github already has 98% of what they need for this business. The marginal cost of this is a rounding error for them.

More than that, it's an excellent differentiator for their business, so then can justify all the GitHub Sponsors expenses just as marketing budget. Other people have been replicating the "nice web front-end for Git" part of their business. But this turns GitHub's large audience into a potential revenue source, which will be very hard for other people to duplicate.

Things like Patreon and Twitch were definitely watershed moments for their respective industries. It's true that, as before, most people doing the thing still won't make much money. But still, a lot of people are now making a living in a way where they are directly responsible to the people they serve, without intermediaries like record companies or publishers.

I don't know how everyone else uses patreon, but I don't even look at the garbage people post on their patreon. I'm subscribed literally only to support the work they are actually doing. Not their progress updates.

I only support two people through Patreon, but this is how I use it, too. I never actually go to their Patreon pages, or bother with any of the special "Patreon benefits" they may offer.

I just want to give them some money, nothing more.

Don't really know how a single anecdotal experience can be used to extrapolate the value of the concept. This is about pay per value. If enough people value something and have enough ethical principle, they'll contribute. You can make a lot money if you add value to people. I pay $5 a month to a Fitness coach who posts amazing videos on youtube for free. It's valuable to me, so I return the favor. If someone falls on the street, we rush over help them up. The same concept needs to start applying for development.

I'd be up for automated payment suggestions in the corner of the page based on how much I've viewed or used the content, since I've so far sporadically chipped in a few bucks to youtubers. I'd like to be more even handed with my support.

There were these sort of reminders in the shareware, which was when I was young and didn't have much coin to chip in but it did present a good reminder every time I started the application. They'd even delay you 30 seconds before loading some of the apps if you were freeloading too often. Gosh, shareware, those were the days...

I have seen shifts from Youtube to Patreon as the primary means of support (Adpocalypse), so I'm surprised you list Youtube as a successor to Patreon instead of the other way around.

Patreon by no means should be expected to guarantee you find backers. They (and services like them) make it easy to concentrate on your content/creation, and less on the nitty-gritty details of how to collect your patrons' money. That doesn't mean it's easy to get patrons (or even should be), because, you know, you have to produce something that they want to pay to support. It just means that the logistical details of how to collect money from people who want to give it to you, should not take up much of your time.

If you have realistic expectations about what Patreon (or any other crowdfunding tool) should be expected to do, I think it's working out just fine.

I've observed a bit of a shift from YouTube Ads => Patreon => YouTube Sponsorship/Membership as the main way some of the creators I follow support themselves, so that might be why it was listed as the successor.

Aha that makes sense.

> 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.

I don't think Github is here for the money but for fortifying their position as the place where software is.

I've noticed that when a side project becomes a Patreon project, suddenly more time is spent with community involvement; blog posts, live streams, etc. Even $100 a month creates this implicit reporting obligation to keep the community in the loop, which might end up eating time that might be spent doing something else. It might also burn out a more introverted developer.

Many developers, IMO, actively ignore their community (close issues, ignore pull requests) and take their project the direction they want to without external interference. (and this is their divine right)

However I think this implicit obligation you refer to would keep projects open.

You'd deal with the same problem if you received $100 through a donation button. People would start saying things like "I didn't pay $5 for you to take a leave of absence for a month!" or "I paid $5 and you aren't going to implement my request?"

Accepting money at all is not a trivial decision.

Most developers for popular open source projects are already engaged with their audience. I don't feel that their level of engagement with their community is going to change based on my 1st hand experience with something like OpenCollective. Both of the projects that I've tipped haven't changed the way they communicate. It's the same whether or not you donated.

https://opencollective.com/nest

https://opencollective.com/date-fns

What you're describing isn't a problem at least for open source developers. There's no significant extra work for them if they want donations aside from posting a line of text and a link. Now with Github, it's even easier since it's baked in.

Stats like "2%: The percentage of Patreon creators who earn more than the federal minimum wage through the site" are pretty meaningless when there's zero barrier to signing up and asking people to fund your hobby.

People shouldn't be misled into have unreasonable expectations of how easy it is to make a living this way, but I'm not sure how much of that is Patreon's fault. It's a platform, you still have to create the value and attract customers.

Micro-patronage seems to be a hard way to get by.

It'd be more lucrative for a patronage website to allow someone to go after big whales.

Just imagine if someone got a 1 million dollar grant. Even if it took a long time to secure it, it'd be a lot better than convincing 200,000 ppl for $5.

The benefit of a website like Patreon is reducing friction for small transactions like this. If you're going to put in lots of time and effort to convince one person to give you a million dollars, you can probably get them to write you a check more easily than you could get them to pay through Patreon But For Whales.

This was a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19991469 but we detached it because it's a large subthread that's nearly all about Patreon.

For now, it seems that the Microsoft acquisition has gone well, right?

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!

don't toy with my feelings. If we get GitHub Runner GitLab will be toast

Don't they already have this with Azure Pipelines?

Totally agree. Running your own gitlab runner is the feature of GitLab I would want the most on GitHub

I think their commercial Github Enterprise product does this exactly.

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.

So your argument is that because GitHub no longer has a profit motive and they're now releasing features at a much faster pace, that the acquisition has somehow gone bad?

The Argument is that it's bad for the market, as it makes it hard for competitors which aren't part of such a large company and hence need to make profit.

Isn't this also an argument against every VC-funded startup in existence?

And basically every free product released by large companies which prioritizes mass distribution and user base over direct product cost. It definitely makes it much harder for the few remaining competitors but also benefits the far greater number of users.

They definitely have a competitive advantage where they're able to build and give away features for free to attract larger mind-share, but it's also the playbook of most large companies with freemium or gateway products. Not seeing why Microsoft needs to limit themselves to the same constraints as their less resourceful competitors.

> It definitely makes it much harder for the few remaining competitors but also benefits the far greater number of users.

It only benefits users in the short term. The consequences of monopoly catch up with all of us, eventually.

Well, actually, yes.

VC funding has nothing to do with it. It’s an argument against the business practice of leveraging monopoly in one market to subsidize selling at a loss in other markets to kill off competition before it can even emerge. That is what Microsoft appears to be doing with Github, and it is overall a bad thing for everyone except Microsoft. We will get less choice in the markets poisoned by Microsoft, and in the long run we will get less value for a higher cost.

By the way, this is not just about Microsoft. Google, Amazon, and to a lesser degree Apple and Facebook are equally guilty of this.

> Now, with Microsoft owning it, they have given up on that idea since Microsoft mainly get their profits elsewhere.

Is that really an issue?

How much did has Google's non-monetization of Chrome hurt the product vs helped it?

Yes, it is an issue.

Why would Microsoft prioritize development and improvements of GitHub when they don't earn a profit from it?

When (in the future) Microsoft needs to earn more profits, they have to make a choice.

Either they improve GitHub and get more developers on board with X.

Or, they improve their Cloud Hosting service, which actually improve profits.

Since GitHub is basically just a cost (with the hopeful promise of future returns of developer mindshare) while Azure makes profit, it's much more likely Microsoft will focus on improving Azure before GitHub.

And as a GitHub user, that idea makes me worry.

It's a bit more nuanced IMO.

I would bet on there being a intense internal competition between Github and the Azure dev tool stack right now.

All the new products Github is introducing are exactly designed to increase the value proposition for paying customers and bind/lure them to the platform instead of them going with AWS/Azure/Google dev tools.

This will increase revenue for Github, and is probably in part driven by internal pressure to make Github profitable.

> Why would Microsoft prioritize development and improvements of GitHub when they don't earn a profit from it?

Because they also use it for their own works.

> when they don't earn a profit from it?

Developers, developers, developers.

The issue is not one of "monetization" vs. "non-monetization", but one of priorities being driven primarily by the interests of a corporate surveillance capitalist owner rather than what's healthy for the community.

Google's agendas (advertising, amp, etc.) are clear in the design decisions taken for Chrome, and slowly we're beginning to see analogous prioritisation come to GitHub. Expect more to come in time.

Does this service work also per project or per user only?

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.

New mode of production please lord anything but capitalism

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