Comment by stateofnounion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stateofnounion | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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