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 $$$ marketing budget.
Please let me give you some of that money that would otherwise be spent on blue pens with logos and endless display ads to GitHub projects. I'd be happy to drive $xxK/mo to open source projects my company depends on or that are simply being used by an audience that aligns with our own. To sell that internally, I need (as in, I would be laughed out of the room to propose it without):
- My sponsoring company logo on the GitHub project page
- UTM links and all that jazz to attribute traffic and campaigns to the specific projects that we sponsor
See https://webpack.js.org/ for a good example of a successful sponsorship program. Literally the biggest hurdle remaining for BigCorp to sponsor something like Webpack today is selling your boss on "Patreon" and "OpenCollective". But if you just increase our GitHub budget by a few K/month, AND the marketers get attributable traffic to boot that we can point to, well that's an easy sell!
If however you want to drive Serious Money into actually funding OSS projects please remember this: While virtually no company has a donations budget, almost every company has a $$$ 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.
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).
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 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.
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.)
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?
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: [email protected].
> 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
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.
> 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 -- [email protected].
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
> 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
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.
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.
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!
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?
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 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.
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 [email protected] as well.
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.
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?
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?
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?
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!
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 ?)
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.
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.
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!
> 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?
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.
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 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).
[+] [-] Androider|6 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wtf42|6 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] adamwathan|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ladon86|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pabs3|6 years ago|reply
https://debconf19.debconf.org/sponsors/become-a-sponsor/
[+] [-] CiPHPerCoder|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] rockarage|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EGreg|6 years ago|reply
But your company probably doesn’t depend on our software.
[+] [-] mushufasa|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] Sir_Cmpwn|6 years ago|reply
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: [email protected].
[+] [-] justinclift|6 years ago|reply
GitLab may be in a position to do so, unsure about others.
[+] [-] return1|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] pault|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buro9|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] devonzuegel|6 years ago|reply
> 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 -- [email protected].
[+] [-] amirathi|6 years ago|reply
- 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
[+] [-] xwdv|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] usrusr|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zapita|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gmueckl|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pingucrimson|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] zild3d|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] zapita|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jnbiche|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] return1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VikingCoder|6 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] TkTech|6 years ago|reply
[1]: https://help.github.com/en/articles/displaying-a-sponsor-but...
[+] [-] alannallama|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] return1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patcon|6 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] devonzuegel|6 years ago|reply
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 [email protected] as well.
[+] [-] mherrmann|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] diggan|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] dangjc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dopeboy|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] TheRealWatson|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] beat|6 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] swaggyBoatswain|6 years ago|reply
Would the sponsorship be a subscription model or can you also do a one time payment donation?
[+] [-] C4stor|6 years ago|reply
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 ?)
[+] [-] liveoneggs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nstart|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] seren|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] marktani|6 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] koolba|6 years ago|reply
What's to stop me^Wsomeone else and their friend from sponsoring each other for $5K to collect the $5K in matching funds?
[+] [-] SquishyPanda23|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] raphlinus|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kodablah|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hp|6 years ago|reply
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).