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!
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.
How are those different exactly?
The second may or may not be a loss leader, but it will contribute something in revenue for the business to stay afloat.
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.
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.
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.