Thank you to our maintainers
github.blog
github.blog
I've been solo maintaining my project since 2008 and average about ~425,000 downloads/week per NPM. My sum total of donations prior to GitHub's was maybe $5. Making money on a JavaScript library was certainly never my goal but I sincerely appreciate the acknowledgement that my project has worth that someone is willing to pay for.
It's a niche project (even more so when I started it to salt/hash passwords client side during the expensive SSL days) so it's almost never worth advertising :)
I feel like I should qualify this further. I actually missed the original email and spent a day or so realising friends and open source colleagues were being recognised, whilst believing my own OSS wasn't in the mix. And I was pleased for them.
I've been doing OSS for more than a decade. I enjoy it. I wish companies directly supported it, as paying for what you value is responsible and wise. GitHub just did that. Thank you GitHub. I appreciate it. This was a good thing. Well done!
If Microsoft didn't fight FOSS so aggressively, perhaps the world would support it more. Instead, Microsoft alone will profit, and they tossed a couple people a one time tiny sum.
So yes, well done Github, you've further divided a community.
Change happens slowly. This is a small step in the right direction.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the complainers’ employers paid a tiny, one time $550 to open source projects they depend on.
I often see that a corporation spends e.g. $1M on a marketing blitz about a $50,000 donation, or runs some campaign where consumers need to do something for some very nominal donation somewhere.
The cynic in me also looks at this as a bribe. Someone who got a $500 gift is much more likely to stay on github. Do that for the top 1000 projects, and you've stemmed the flow to gitlab.
The cynic in me became a lot more cynical when github started selling my own code back to me with copilot.
Now, this is a pseudonymous account so you obviously don’t know whether you use my projects. Just donate to whatever you use.
To expand: I see grandstanding all the time. I see precious little money flowing into my PayPal tip jar. Casual users of my completely free web services have been a lot more generous than companies/developers using my open source libraries/tools. I’m completely fine with the lack of donations, but that certainly makes all the grandstanding from stingy people who don’t give a dime very annoying.
1. From my observation, donors tend to appreciate other donors a bit more.
2. I’ve confronted a few of these people in the past. When asked how much they donated, the answer was always I don’t donate because excuses X, Y, Z. But rich companies/people must donate more; they’re all PR stunts; blah blah.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeZ3_OtDa7E
2. I only work on open source. My income is at most half of what it would be if I worked on proprietary software. I do donate to other projects, and I do appreciate (serious) donors. I've never gotten (or asked for) tips, but I've gotten one or two donations big enough to make a difference.
3. I would also encourage you to read about how con artists (and marketers) manipulate people by generate reciprocity:
- Someone on the street hands you a "free" pamphlet / flower / etc. and asks for a donation.
- Thought leaders are sent a free product
- Managers / executives are wined and dined just below what conflict-of-interest laws allow
... and so on.
I don't appreciate being manipulated. I have turned down gifts and donations before which felt in bad faith.
Why you think that it applies here?
However, my experience is that cost structures at FAANG, Microsoft, etc. are astronomical. In abstract, if the CEO decides to donate $500k and make a blog post, things can sometimes be relatively fast and easy.
In practice, usually one person spends a few weeks or months working to make a case for it, which bounces around the reporting channels, approvals, etc. Communication about it is approved through legal and marketing. Legal brings up issues about what to do if a maintainer is in Cuba and subject to Cuban embargoes, China and subject to Chinese taxes, or the Talysh-Mughan Autonomous Republic.
Median compensation is around $350k (and total cost close to double that). Basically anything external-facing like this usually ends up costing a lot by small business standards. $500k is 0.0003% of Microsoft's annual revenues, or on the order of magnitude of the annual cost of 1 employee (or 0.0006% of the organization). At a trillion-dollar scale, it kinda makes sense to have process. A mistake can wipe out single-digit percent of stock value overnight.
My experience, also, is that the process doesn't improve quality. It just prevents stupid shit from going out.
How much more they needed to spend to make also blog post PR and other PR stuff, in addition to donations?
It's not punishment. I think everybody here would reply in the same way if someone asked a week ago "what if GitHub donated $500 to top-1000 OSS projects?"
A company gives to open source projects.
People complain about how little it is, and generate negative PR for the donation.
For a company, negative PR is a punishment.
What's the lesson here? At least the lesson some in the HN community are teaching is that if you are a big company and you donate to open source projects, you will generate negative PR for yourself.
(We can assume and/or question their motivations, but to me, motivations are almost always irrelevant to an act of generosity. Feel good about yourself if you help others out! Garner positive PR if you help others out as a company! Why should positive things for the giver detract from an act of generosity? Got a problem with the system? That's a problem with the system, not the person or company being generous.)
You're a traveller in a lesser economically developed country. You're in the wilderness, you haven't seen anyone in a while. You see a stranger, who sees you're travelling alone and invites you to a meal, eager to share a part of their life with you.
Now this is how GitHub is acting:
At the end, you reach into your pocket for a note of the local currency, the stranger shakes his head.
You continue taking out a nominal amount.
"No", the stranger says in his language. You insist, putting the note into his hand. The stranger looks offended. You smile, oblivious.
"THANK YOU VERY MUCH!" You repeat and kill the stranger's act of altruism.
But I don't think it is anything more than marketing on the side of GitHub. And I think what annoys people is when people seem to think it is more than that.
You're coming off as a very bitter actor, with all comments verging on trolling.
I'm sure if some other company donated $0.5M to FOSS maintainers the negativity would be greatly muted or even absent.
Microsoft uses these platforms to advertise/promote. I don't like it. Advertising and PR are pollution. If Coca-Cola PR or big oil or the tobacco industry promoted on this website, I'd have a similar distaste for it.
When you compared the payments to "blood money" I was like "Oh my", but then I recalled an article that points out that Bill Gates knew Epstein "decades prior to 2011" ( https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/05/investigative-reports/t... ) and I throw up my hands (and my breakfast.) What a world we live in, eh?
Not life changing but certainly always a nice way to start the day, with some unexpected $$.
I guess I have a bunch of repos with lots of stars, but equally very few actual real users. But nothing that seems significantly "special" enough to make me a top user, and nothing that I'd expect github themselves are using, even indirectly.
Weird. But nice.
I've been signed up for sponsors for a year or so, because people keep saying it's a good thing. In all that time I had one guy sponsor me for a few months, then stop. A nice experience, but at the same time I guess you have to be extremely lucky, prolific, or shamefully promoting yourself to actual get enough income to live on.
I expect that user facing programs are more likely to succeed than libraries.
The impact is going to differ per country. For example, 550 USD might not be much for an average American programmer but for an average Ukrainian or Indian (the latter has a heart connected to) its a whole lot more. I also suppose Russian devs are out of luck.
So its either small community hosting like Codeberg.org or independent hosting, which both hurt a projects discoverability and ease to contribute.
Is ActivityPub / decentralization viable for git though?
Also Gitea still lacks a Decent CI/CD integration/workflow, GitHub Actions and Gitlab CI/CD are much better than the Drone/Woodpecker + Gitea workflow.
It's not a popularity contest.
I think that the lock-in from github are in the other parts of the system: the CI, issue tracking, comment section, etc. This is what "forces" most people to have accounts there if they want to collaborate.
With federation this would be solved, but the issue is that GitHub probably won't support federation.
If I understood the idea of the people working on forgefed, this is not true. It's quite possible that issues/discussions and even code reviews to happen over activitypub.
> GitHub probably won't support federation
They still have an usable API, so even if they don't support it federation officially, it will be possible to implement, e.g, a bridge bot that reads/writes from your AP server to the GitHub projects that you need to interact with.
https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/join/
You're joking right? If this is complex then I guess you've never signed a CLA for apache or any other project?
Also you don't have to email anyone to renew anything(2) And the project can seek profit too, so compared to GitHub, its a hassel.
1. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati...
2.https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati...
Yet it is the only real solution to not have a megacroporation control the public square for open source development. I hope that efforts to federate source forges succeed because moving to the next hosted forge with generous plans for open source developers is only a temporary solution until the owners decide that they need a return on their investment.
I mean, of course MS is not donating out of pure altruism. But so what?
The topic of FOSS funding is quite large and actually something where I'm surprised there's not more consulting around.
You have government grants. You have university employees. You have company employees of which Google and, indeed, Microsoft have many working solely on open source. You have open core companies (Elastic, Scylla, data bricks, ...). You have self funding and Patreon (not usually sustainable). You have funding via FOSS organizations (python, rust foundation, ...).
Did you not know about all these?
Does the money come with any strings attached? Are they blocking other companies from pitching in?
Your issue is with the amount they are giving, not with the fact that they giving. The way to fix this is not by saying "this is so little, just shove it", the way to fix this is by getting other companies (regardless of their size) to contribute as well.
> The topic of FOSS funding is quite large and actually something where I'm surprised there's not more consulting around.
Yes, that I completely agree. I am still puzzled at a recent conversation I had here on HN with a self-professed "tech strategy advisor for PE firms" who simply could not understand the possible benefits in looking at the services that a company depends on and in funding open source alternatives.
No, my issues are manifold. With the slice of conversation I'm having with you, the issue I am stressing here is that a one off payment of 500 USD is not "funding" in the sense that someone can quite their job or even go to a 4 day week and shore up their finances with it. It's a one off.
You also mentioned the FOSS Foundations, like the PSF. Where do you think that their money comes from? I have $25/month sent their way to support the JazzBand devs. Do you think that I should stop my contribution just because it is so small in the grand scheme of things?
Of course no one is going to quit their jobs over one company giving $500/year. But I'm failing to see how this is an issue. It's not like MS / Github are announcing they are going to hire all the FOSS devs from all projects they depend on. They just gave some money. Instead of looking at this and thinking "this is BS", why can't we look at this and think "Oh, nice! If even shitty companies like MS are starting to help, how can we get the better ones to do it too?"
[0]: Organizations will have at least a 10% fee taken from GitHub once the beta is finished. There's also no guarantee that personal accounts will remain fee-less too, this could easily be "just another" spot where a company offers something for free for mass adoption and then charges for it later. In any case it's marketing for a feature that provides revenue to GitHub.
Having people talk about whether 500k is the right amount to donate for a gigantic company like Microsoft is much better than people discussing the ethics, legality, trustworthiness and pricing of copilot.
Last week we talked about whether or not it is legal to use license x to train their AI or if they will secretly steal our proprietary code and accidentally leak it for everyone else to see. Today we talk about whether the nice gesture for maintainers are enough.
- On the one hand, for GitHub, 500k is nothing, just a PR move. For maintainers, $500 might make the difference between struggling to pay rent and having enough money to leave it in the bank, or having a nice dinner at the end of the month.
- On the other hand, for GitHub, 500k is nothing, just a PR move! If they really wanted to show appreciation for the maintainers that power a billion dollar business, more than a drop in the bucket would be great.
So, I guess it boils down to: that’s a great start, don’t stop there!
Microsoft also has its FOSS Fund which donates $10K each month to a project that is nominated and voted upon by its FOSS contributors. https://github.com/microsoft/foss-fund
Both are valid opinions, I think, but personally I tend to be more impressed by the smaller business.
At any rate, as I said, it’s a great start.
What about all of the banks, oil, retail etc. with enormous ARR? Every company relies on open source. Most do not contribute money or people to the effort. We ought to be celebrating and encouraging more of this.
I don’t have exact figures for most of these companies, of course, but I have seen many small consulting or teaching businesses contribute a lot of money to OSS (here’s one such example, I don’t know the company, just a quick look on Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/frontendmasters). That’s because they rely on the success of those software systems to continue making money, of course, but I don’t think that’s any less true for the big payers.
> What about all of the banks, oil, retail etc. with enormous ARR?
I in no way meant to single out GitHub or insinuate that what they were doing was bad, that’s why I tried to end on a high note (to emphasize yet again: _it’s a great start_). What I’m trying to say is that I hope it doesn’t stop there, for GitHub or anyone else. The incentive to do it is higher when there’s good PR coming out of it, and that is mostly true the first time around. I’m hoping that there are more incentives at play than just PR (genuinely, not in a “but I don’t think so” way).
Which is nice for the recipients of course, but otherwise is what it is.
† yeah, yeah, soon they'll be charging 10% to companies who sponsor, but I'm betting us little folks donating are cumulatively at least a million dollars and they probably don't want to loose hundred thousand when they could have a tax credit for it.
You don't pay taxes on revenue, you pay it on profit. If they pay out all the revenue they owe taxes on $0
Presumably people are just as or even more upset at all the other companies who use open source internally but don't give cash like this to large numbers of open source projects? Right? [insert Anakin Padme meme] If all big companies donated $500K a year to open source, that'd be a pretty significant change in the environment, wouldn't it?
I have noticed for a while that HN comments lean really anti-Github. I don't really understand why.
Just because GitHub might get something out of it does not make it bad.
If those other companies stood to gain as much for $500K spent on marketing, they'd be doing it too.
GitHub isn't somehow more benevolent than all the others. I happen to like GitHub for the product it provides. I just find corporate marketing using maintainers as a proxy is lame. But good for the people who received the money, however.
No. $0 is nothing. $500k is $500k.
But if you think both are the same, then surely you think they should have just done nothing since it's equivalent?
But because they put $500k toward those people whose projects they rely upon, there is now a discussion of what a pittance it is (whether or not you append "good job, hopefully you do more in the future" doesn't change the critical tone you set with all your other words you said before you said that).
The lesson: Almost no act of generosity goes without criticism on social media or discussion sites.
(Note: I hold a pragmatic view of generosity. I don't care what a person or company's motivations are for being generous. PR? Great! Let's show it makes for great PR to be generous! Selfishness, bolstering one's sense of grandeur? Great, feel whatever you want about yourself, as others benefited! Trying to out-compete a rival or friend by giving more than they? Great competition to be in! Did GitHub give to one person? Great! Did they give to 900 people? Great! Did they give each person $10? Great! Did they give each person $550? Great!)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31720356
Archive link to the article, seems down at the moment.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220618225755/https://blog.jaib...
Not saying that science funding is perfect.
Now, should it be the main source of income for an OSS project, especially when it’s “critical infrastructure” (let’s just pretend that term is well defined and means whatever it means to each of us)? Probably not, and there should probably be a better way.
Whether science funding in particular is a good model I would debate, since it can be such a beauty pageant at times.
I am not, but what I know is, it involves lots of buerocracy and still lets lots of science unfunded. But this is understandable, as science is unlimited and the question remains, who decides what is worth funding? And remember that funding is tax payer money.
This is an uncharitable interpretation of this initiative. What makes you think so?
But you’re right: in the end trying to find out what their actual motives are is purely speculation, and I shouldn’t have phrased it as if it were a fact.
Is that enough to be allowed to have an opinion?
Or..
I can say "thank you for your supporting open source" and skip all the stuff about acting like a sanctimonious jerk on HN for magic points.
Right now, you're being that guy in a lot of these comments.
But I want to make one thing clear: I’m not doing this for HN karma. I haven’t commented on here in years, and this article prompted a reaction. Trying to somehow shoehorn that into "you’re only doing this for points” is invalidating that in a way that I find troubling, because, really, how can I prove you wrong? I might just have an opinion on something and wanted to engage with a community about it, or I might not. Only I can tell (and you, apparently).
EDIT: Correction. I submitted two comments 2 months ago that I forgot about, the comments before that are from 2019.
Microsoft revenue is $160B. Have they donated $2.6 billion to open source this year?
But the maintainers aren’t “their” maintainers. They are maintainers using GitHub for their projects.
Probably just me overreacting, just thought I’d mention it.
> From the U.S. to Japan to Brazil, if you’re one of the people or projects we identified
> then you will get a confirmation about the sponsorship before the end of June.
I'd love to be able to filter by language. My main work is not JS and my JS dependencies are kind of incidental to it, but JS repos dominate the listing for me, I guess just by how JS is so dependency prolific.
They are the ones complaining about both GitHub giving money to maintainers and spending money on marketing.
To those people: there's no harm being done by this and there is good. That's how you judge something like this.
The same phenomenon applies to reluctance to remunerate blood donations.
> Some studies in psychology and economics have found that material incentive discourages prosocial behaviors and causes decrease in blood supply.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2847338/
I think the one-off donation to be completely tin-eared. They should offer to pay a salary to developers working on critical infrastructure, Jetbrains effectively did this with Nikita Popov, or leave open source alone.
GitHub has shown they are naive regarding psychology around this area.
Also while I'm familiar with the debate around incentives for blood donations that particular paper you have cited is terrible.
Notably they do a literature review where they find discussions about how it could theoretically undermine motivations, but don't address the counter-argument they mention themselves where they list example of rewards being used to successfully increase supply! They list studies where it both decreased and increased supply, which seems to indicate that the type of incentive and the conditions in which it was offered make a significant difference.
They end up arguing that there are risks that incentivized donors come from groups of higher risk of infectious blood diseases. This may or may not true, but is a different argument to if incentives work.
Would you feel the same way if they'd said "We're adding new features for our users"?
I suspect the maintainers would definitely say they are a user of GitHub. Most would not say they are a maintainer of GitHub (at least I don’t think so).
To pick the most adverse example: GitHub could equally talk about Gitlab and say "Our competitor". They're clearly not saying Gitlab belongs to them or giving them some kind of connection that doesn't exist.
It’s sounds more (to me) like calling someone else’s kids one of your children because they are visiting your house.
Anyway, I can only imagine how uninteresting this conversation must be to anyone else :)
On the other hand, this does nothing for me as a Free software fanatic to make Github and Microsoft any more palatable. I still can't believe that a closed, proprietary centralized webapp has so completely co-opted both the git DCVS and FOSS itself. (I've heard people unironically call Github the "flagship of the FOSS movement".)
The image I get is of the boss riding by in a gilded carriage casting handfuls of gold coins to the serfs.
Some of the comments here are of the "shut up and be grateful" ilk, and some even try to shame people for not being sufficiently grateful and/or uncritical. I call BS on that.
If Github/MS find themselves in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation in re: supporting FOSS maintainers it's only because of their own actions and history.
If they really wanted to thank FOSS folks they could open source Github, eh? Or Windows.
Examples here: https://twitter.com/philliphaydon/status/1541021821637922816
Just need to figure out how to disable that css option.
Thanks for the info!
Microsoft github might be doing this to retain projects that might be switching to non-corporate forges, or appease the concerns around copylot.
Or expand "github Sponsors" and achieve even more control over the FOSS community.
Beware of strangers bearing gifts.
But as someone that tended to create orgs for projects rather than have it all under a personal account, should I move all of the projects? I guess so, right?
What's the recommended way to move Go repos without breaking them for all users? (I have low-thousands of stars, but the largest project is used by mid-thousands of projects - so I anticipate breakage for my hopeful $5 one-off solo sponsor).
Something like using a vanity import path for all projects? https://sagikazarmark.hu/blog/vanity-import-paths-in-go/
You currently have some number of org repos; eg: my-project/my-project, foobar/foobar
And you have your personal account: buro9.
You use your personal account to commit and maintain those org repos.
As long as you set your personal account as an admin/maintainer on those org repos, I think you get all the benefits you need? I don't think there's any benefit to moving eg my-project/my-project to buro9/my-project
For those of you who complained about the money, you people need to reflect on your attitudes and what brought you to this point.
Ugly.
We’re not the computers we program.
Thank you for writing exactly as you did, it’s frustrating for the “old timers” coming from the hacker culture of yore to grapple with the money grubbers.
Many high-profile Free and Open Source software projects are developed mainly by paid employees. Some examples: the Linux kernel, OpenJDK, Firefox, and Chromium.
If someone wants to put their work in the public domain and only leave a note in their README that they don't want this to be used for profit and then complain when a company uses it a way they don't like then I 100% agree and support them.
This is the problem with laws and rules. They tend to replace independent moral thought. Instead of asking whether it was right or wrong for that company to use it without the consent of the author, we all get stuck on "well, technically". There's a difference between legal rights and morals.
tl;dr: Some people choose not to participate in the copyright system simply because they wanna push back against us offshoring our abilities to think critically about morals to regulatory bodies. Open source isn't "an act of charity". It's a lot of things to a lot of people
This sounds like the Creative Commons NonCommercial licenses. Too bad they aren't recommended for code too. https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpre...
There are plenty of open source maintainers who do it for the good of sharing knowledge and enabling others under no expectation of pay.
Here, I don't think it applies.
Any technical project requires focus, and if I paid the bills with something else, I wouldn't have time and space to focus.
I've never been particularly successful with side projects until they became full-time projects. I don't know many other people who have. Side projects are great for exploring, but when one gains traction, to be successful, I've always needed to find a way to focus on it full-time (which means using it to pay the bills).
This is why most high volume OS maintainers are either employed by companies just to maintain the code or they are younger with less life commitments.
(Meanwhile, you solely mention the PR aspect of this act, as if there is no other benefit in the equation. There are two general entities that will benefit from this, although some here seem to prefer no benefit whatsoever befall GitHub/MS and even want to turn this into negative PR. Anyway, assuming it does turn out to be net-positive PR for GitHub/MS, then 900 devs as well as GitHub/MS will benefit from this act.)
I don't think it's the same thing as calling names; it's an important distinction to me to criticize actions and not people, and that's what your parent did.
Many here are criticizing the actions of GitHub/MS. That's fair, but we can also criticize the act of criticizing just the same.
(Again, I might agree with you if bringing "respect" into it could be seen as having a similar effect as name-calling in the sense that it makes the discussion more personal than it needs to be.)
I’m not a maintainer but adjacent to the tech industry (Ed tech) and am hurting for money due to inflation, and I live in a low cost of living area.
You don’t know everyone’s situation. Stop judging them.
I can and will judge them, especially the ones who complain about this money specifically because of their choices.
However, this is about public open source projects. You can earn money with those projects. But then you also have to clearly communicate this. Either by asking for donations, sponsorship or offer a support contract. Because the default model of open source is: Here is some code, here is the license, feel free to use it without going through a paywall first.
And I disagree that it’s the complainers that need to self-reflect. If I had received $500 even in the times I was making the equivalent of ~300EUR per month from such huge assholes like MS, I would honestly have been very conflicted about accepting the money in the first place and in no way would have jumped to their defense.
For most financially successful open source projects that’s exactly how they start.
Context - Github copilot license violations.
To the rest, congratulations and thank you from those of us who thanklessly use your hard work. I hope this kind of public appreciation takes off and we see more large names using this as a template.
They should probably be paying more, not less.
How much did Bainbridge Health give to open source health platforms? Hopefully at least .001% of those amounts.
Shh, you're not supposed to explain the trick.
They owe you a copyright header when distributing your BSD or MIT licensed code. They owe you adhering to the GPL license when distributing your GPL licensed code.
My read is that they are giving the money to projects they use to develop GitHub itself. And if this has nothing to do with the Copilot issue, why bring it to the conversation?