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Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

I'm almost 100% certain this will go to maintainers that already have good visibility and possibly good funding. This isn't a bad thing inherently, as they are deserving. Rather, I wish an explicit goal of the program was to specifically highlighted active projects that clearly don't have any resources but are still very popular in their communities.

What would be even more cool is if GitHub had a residency program for top OSS contributors / maintainers where they could work - with benefits pay etc - on their projects under GitHubs employ. Kind of like how some Journalist outfits (e.g. Mother Jones) have their fellowship programs.

Big tech companies do have the resources to do this, and its not like there isn't precedent for it in the industry. This would just take it to a whole new level.

I also imagine the marketing positivity would be pretty strong for them.

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> I'm almost 100% certain this will go to maintainers that already have good visibility and possibly good funding

In my opinion, most of this will turn into a way to game the system. Like another comment said, this is Microsoft's "Summer Of Code".

For a successful open source funding story, take a look at Mkdocs-Material, which recently crossed $10k/mo:

https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/insiders/

This is interesting. I have noticed something, about certain communities, and where (often but not exclusively) these success stories come from. It seems to be that the general following:

- The frontend ecosystem is one of the worst ecosystems for OSS funding, despite its enormous size

- Python, C#, C/C++ communities seem very much okay paying for licenses to packages and seem to have a better uptick in funding OSS. I've seen alot of Python success stories in particular

- If you aren't in a mainstream language either your community funds you very closely or its not funded at all, there seems to be little middle ground. Wish I could think of two direct comparative examples but I think looking at ocaml vs haskell is telling (idk if their userbase is similar in size or not, I am almost certain ocaml is bigger but not sure by how much)

Regardless, its still only the top 1-2% of projects, regardless of ecosystem, that get most of the funding. The sad reality is often its OSS maintainers paying other OSS maintainers most of the time.

Gating base features behind a paywall is not really very Open Source.

https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/insiders/#whats-... includes subtitles and icons as paywall features.

Open Core is a plague on Open Source.

IMO it's not a big deal, and one can edit the jinja2 template to hack in support. Plus, it'll be available to everyone at some point (hopefully).

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