In the Clojure community we have Clojurists Together [0] which is just a program that allows both companies and individual (at different prices) to contribute funding the development of Open Source projects. I think that model works quite well.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.clojuriststogether.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.clojuriststogether.org&#x2F;</a>

&quot;Take Patreon as an example, a popular funding platform for all sorts of things including open source projects that has been around since 2013 and has paid out $1 billion to creators since then. While that’s an astonishing figure, Patreon isn’t a sustainable business with its current private company model and level of VC funding of $105M:“Under the company’s current business model, 90 percent of funds are paid directly to content creators. Patreon takes 5 percent, and the remaining 5 percent covers transaction fees.” Patreon CEO Jack Conte said in an interview with CNBC, that the platform will soon be facing the challenge of maintaining a profitable model as the company continues its growth.In 2019, the company is also on track to pay out $500 million to content creators, 5% of that is $25 million and Patreon has ~300 employees, so probably not even covering their labor costs.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;crowd-funding-platform-patreon-announces-it-will-pay-out-half-a-billion-dollars-to-content-creators-in-2019.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;crowd-funding-platform-patre...</a>

&gt; doesn&#x27;t work well for Patreon and othersWhat do you mean? What&#x27;s wrong with Patreon?

cool feature but putting the burden of funding on individuals vs companies is supporting what I call the &quot;open source gig economy&quot; - doesn&#x27;t work well for Patreon and others - we need better ways to sustain individuals who choose not start their own company around open source projects or work full time at a company supporting open source<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aniszczyk.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;25&#x2F;troubles-with-the-open-source-gig-economy-and-sustainability-tip-jar&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aniszczyk.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;25&#x2F;troubles-with-the-open-...</a>

I guess because it is still in limited beta. Pretty sure it&#x27;s gonna open for everyone in the future.

I love this. It&#x27;s actually huge, but I wonder why you have to apply for a waitlist in order to be able to get sponsored? Why wouldn&#x27;t we be allowed to sponsor anyone? I suppose it has something to do to prevent money laundry?

And yet the open alternatives don’t seem to have amounted to anyone making a living from open source. Centralizing it offers a nicer UX - it’s not just about feature parity.

The Patreon product is 10% payment processing and 90% the marketing&#x2F;branding&#x2F;placement&#x2F;ease-of-use&#x2F;trust&#x2F;normalisation, or whatever it is that makes people open their wallets.If GitHub Sponsors is stronger at whatever-it-is-that-makes-people-donate, that would be their advantage.

&gt; Seems what they are planning to offer is not better nor different than what others already are providing (see OpenCollective or LiberaPay).It&#x27;s got a major company with deep and signficant expertise in security, payments, and accouting. A name that people and companies already trust with a raft of compliance all handled already. It might just be me, but if I were to speculate I would guess that OpenCollective and LiberaPay can&#x27;t quite claim the same. I know that if I want to, I can get a SOC 2 report from GitHub.These are nor minor administrative details to be brushed aside idly. They matter, particularly to a company keen to ensure that they never have to apologize for a partner fucking up credit card handling or to someone with a corporate card who has to be careful how they use it. These things are major features.

Yeah, but they are Github, so they will clearly win out over those companies I’ve never heard of.Everyone with a big report for your OSS project is already on your Github page. Its perfect.

&gt; This seems like it&#x27;s needed and (dareisay) overdue?Seems what they are planning to offer is not better nor different than what others already are providing (see OpenCollective or LiberaPay).In fact, it seems less than the existing options. The existing options are open platforms with open source code. What GitHub is introducing, seems to be a loss-leader (they give free cash away) for the sole purpose of getting attention. It&#x27;s obvious the feature they are now introducing is not for making the ecosystem better, but to lock the ecosystem harder to GitHub.

Interesting. I agree that it&#x27;s not going to be the same, but I welcome that. Currently open source is just a tool for big tech to advance their agenda.I think this is a brilliant move from MS. They gain goodwill and at the same time help shift expectations of OSS developers towards being paid for work. Given that both of Azure rivals are using FOSS extensively, while MS is not (much?), this could help weaken the rivals.The reason I welcome this is that too often OSS is simply not good enough and would be (imho) much better if developers were paid for their work.

It wouldn&#x27;t surprise me if maintainers suddenly start ignoring issues from non-sponsors because they can&#x27;t handle all of them.

&gt; Does this hurt FOSS contributions, because now people start to expect to be paid rather than doing it for inherent motivations?I think having donatiom payments integrated with the platform will shift the motivation of programmers from intrinsic to extrinsic one. The design seems to show a call to action to &#x27;sponsor&#x27; right in the github profile. That&#x27;s a big emphasis.Will such shift &#x27;hurt&#x27; the FOSS contribution? I&#x27;m not sure because the answer depends what we mean by &#x27;hurt&#x27;. But I fear that it&#x27;s not going to be quite the same.

&gt; 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?I&#x27;d also be concerned about features being implemented because there&#x27;s money behind it, forgoing more important technical reasons.Of course there are many projects that already implement this &#x27;quid pro quo&#x27; development strategy, and open source projects with big corporate backers. How do these projects currently handle monetary influence in their decision making?

I&#x27;ve also worked at multiple companies where they were afraid of open source because the project might be abandoned.They would happily pay thousands for a closed source dependency because they could guarantee it would be supported.This could offer a nice medium where a company can be pretty sure that it will stick around (based on funding) and contribute to make sure that it does.

&gt; Often these opportunistic parasites would never contribute anything backSo a user of open source to make money is a parasite? Are people that use LibreOffice to type legal documents they charge money for considered parasites if they don’t contribute to source code or financially to LibreOffice? If that’s the case, there is an incentive to use closed source software and just pay for it so as to avoid having to be called parasites and incur the pontifications. How many people here use Postgres but never contribute to it? I might guess it’s 99.99%. If I am running a business and there is an expectation that I pay for open source either in time or money, then that makes it no different from a cost perspective than paying for closed source — which lowers the incentive to use open source in the first place. “It’s free software, but if you use it for free, you’ll be called a parasite.” Sure. That’s a great way to promote open source. If open source people want to get paid for open source, then charge money for it, don’t simply use a passive-aggressive guilt trip, just be upfront.

&gt; Do companies use GitHub sponsorships to judge the health of dependencies? Will they create budgets to support their dependencies systematically?In my past I&#x27;ve worked with multiple places that absolutely loved open-source. Because to them it was &quot;free&quot;. Something they could use in their products and then charge customers for. Often these opportunistic parasites would never contribute anything back; going out of their way to work around missing features or bugs rather than trying to fix or contribute towards the codebase.I doubt that these companies now, despite depending on such OS, would pay paying money&#x2F;contribute; no matter how administratively trivial it became.

&gt; If maintainers can see who donated, do they prioritize issues &#x2F; pull requests? (I think that could be a good thing actually).This is one step away from consumers being able to put bug bounties on issues too

How so? If anything, it would be cool to have issue bounties to put your money to get the stuff you want solved.

Sometimes fine PR&#x27;S just sit without review or  merging because the maintainer is busy with their life. If some money rewards them to look, great.

&gt; If maintainers can see who donated, do they prioritize issues &#x2F; pull requests? (I think that could be a good thing actually).This actually seems like it would be terrible. Contributions should be evaluated on merit, not on bribes.The overall concept seemed good at first but you raised some real concerns.

This seems like it&#x27;s needed and (dareisay) overdue?Integrating sponsorship subscriptions into the core experience is sure to increase payments, a la twitch subscriptions&#x2F;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 &#x2F; 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?

don&#x27;t toy with my feelings. If we get GitHub Runner GitLab will be toast

Don&#x27;t they already have this with Azure Pipelines?

Totally agree. Running your own gitlab runner is the feature of GitLab I would want the most on GitHub

I think their commercial Github Enterprise product does this exactly.

Yes, free private repos alone was amazing and now this? With 2x matching (up to 5k) from MS themselves - this is amazing.If only they would release something similar to GitLab Runner a.k.a. GitHub Runner it would be golden!

So your argument is that because GitHub no longer has a profit motive and they&#x27;re now releasing features at a much faster pace, that the acquisition has somehow gone bad?

&gt; Now, with Microsoft owning it, they have given up on that idea since Microsoft mainly get their profits elsewhere.Is that really an issue?How much did has Google&#x27;s non-monetization of Chrome hurt the product vs helped it?

I disagree. Before the acquisition, the work on GitHub was to make GitHub sustainable in it&#x27;s own right.Now, with Microsoft owning it, they have given up on that idea since Microsoft mainly get their profits elsewhere.Instead, GitHub have now become a loss-leader for Microsoft, where every feature is meant to either lock in open developers in a closed source platform, or attract more open source developers to use their platform.I did like the way of old GitHub more, even though they were slower at releasing stuff.

For now, it seems that the Microsoft acquisition has gone well, right?

As someone who was around 10 years ago I&#x27;d question that a little, there were lots of OSS companies then, and lots of people getting hired and paid to work on OSS too.A difference today is trying to move some of the money down to smaller-scale projects that have little chance of becoming a standalone company, and also more options to get paid without having to go work at a big company.

It&#x27;s interesting to see the gradual monetization of Open Source. 10 years ago this was just something you did for fun but with the proliferation of services charging for it, the landscape is shifting rapidly. Github are moving in some interesting directions and it&#x27;ll be interesting to see if they can stay ahead of the competition with how trivial it is to migrate to a rival. I wouldn&#x27;t bet on them personally but it&#x27;ll be fun to watch either way!

WSL is absolutely terrible and can&#x27;t be taken seriously.

* Getting linux on desktop. Check
* Getting OSS contributors paid. CheckUnlike Google, it seems Microsoft (Satya) isn&#x27;t just doing OSS for PR but he probably sincerely believes in it.Thanks also to Hanselman who seemingly has been a major pro-OSS voice.

Microsoft has really become &quot;less evil&quot; in the last couple of years.

Leave it to Microsoft to finally figure out a way to get people and more importantly businesses to fund OSS work.

If I click on any of the actual sponsor buttons it redirects to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;users&#x2F;$user&#x2F;sponsorship" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;users&#x2F;$user&#x2F;sponsorship</a> and 404&#x27;s. Happening for anybody else?

Damn! This is surely an amazing QoL feature. Well done.

One not-so-bad solution could be similar to what StackOverflow does: The issuer of the bounty may decide who gets it. But even if they don&#x27;t issue it to anyone, they don&#x27;t receive their sum back. There there currency is points, but if it&#x27;s real money, any unreleased bounties could go to some kind of general community pot for that project or whole Github after a while.

i think worklist.net has created a bidding platform that works that way. it&#x27;s not popular, but something like that on github be pretty popular imho.

This 1000x. I spoke to a designer at GitHub specifically about this a few years ago. Their initial concern was over-complicating the UI&#x2F;UX. There&#x27;s no doubt they&#x27;ve discussed this internally and I&#x27;m very curious what the hold up is.

Seems like it would give people the wrong idea.

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&#x27;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.

And some of those developers don&#x27;t need the money, but would love for their tip-jar to auto-feed into a charity (or other project!) of their choice.

I would like a onetime donation as well. Especially since there are a lot of small, usefull projects that don&#x27;t need a lot of maintenance.

If they offered both (monthly and one-time payments) then the solution would be to allow the project to allow only one or the other or both or neither. So you could select that you&#x27;d only receive monthly payments and people wouldn&#x27;t be able to send you one-time payments.

I also think it&#x27;s about sustainability. As a developer receiving an X amount every month (+&#x2F;- Y%) can heavily reduce the financial risk and help plan better.I&#x27;m currently not developing any open source software but if I was and worked as a freelancer knowing that by the end of the month I&#x27;ll receive $500 for GitHub would allow me to balance my open source work with the freelance work, ensuring I have enough money to support myself.

Also there are hundreds of way to receive one time donations on the internet currently. GitHub focusing on recurring subscription makes sense.

nah it&#x27;d be better if you could just tip a developer, i&#x27;m more inclined to do a large one time &quot;impulse&quot; donation instead of a continuous drip feedalso i wouldn&#x27;t want to be listed as a sponsor in case the dev wound up doing something controversial(as Opensource devs are wont to do)

Instead of enabling one-time donations, I see some value in sponsorships with a predetermined EOL: Instead of donating $10 one-time, get a 10-month sponsorship for $1 each and at the end of those 10 months, decide whether you want to continue supporting the developer. Github could charge you the $10 (or the interest-adjusted equivalent) up-front to decrease the transaction costs too.This decreases the variation in the developer&#x27;s income and lets them plan for the future accordingly, which is always a good thing.

Bug bounties would be amazing.I&#x27;d drop a lot of money on a particular docker feature that hasn&#x27;t been dealt with for the last 3 years running.

Being able to vote with dollars on bug&#x2F;features would be great.

This is my experience as well. I&#x27;ve done both, and made more money off one-time software sales (rather than patreon-supported OSS) but it was completely unpredictable. There are toxic outcomes from that: you start tailoring your output to what you think the market will do big numbers on, rather than what&#x27;s good. Being a small business person can be brutal and it doesn&#x27;t always lead to you doing good work: it can lead to very cynical exploitation of your perceived market, just to survive for another month.

I only have experience in non-development creative work, but one-off payments&#x2F;donations are much more anxious than monthly. Sales of t-shirts&#x2F;songs&#x2F;ebooks could be higher than what I get monthly on Patreon now, but:1: I could never be sure. One month it was $0, the next it was $3, the next it was $40. This is impossible to plan around. It&#x27;s even worse now with everything moving to SaaS. It&#x27;s easier to justify a subscription to something like EastWest Composer Cloud or Splice when I have a bunch of people subscribing to my work who&#x27;ve been there for months or a year.2: I didn&#x27;t know who they were. This was fine in the good months, but then I hit long stretches with nothing coming in, and I had no idea why. Did the platform make some change? Did my products fall out of fashion? I was at the mercy of opaque storefront logic and priorities.And I don&#x27;t mean in the creepy surveillance state sense. I know most of the people subscribing to me on Patreon through Mastodon. When they unsubscribe, I know why because they tell me. I sold tens of t-shirts years ago. I&#x27;ve never seen someone wear one. Nobody sent me an email. Sales collapsed one day and never returned. Patreon subscribers tell me good things about my music and writing all the time.Neither of these is 100% a problem with one-off contributions, but the level of communication never matched this.

I love this. I do wonder though if anyone can educate me on the choice to do a monthly sponsorship? I think that&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s any other reason why it wasn&#x27;t done I&#x27;d be really grateful if anyone from Github might be able to share.

I think that you can set it up, and cancel it after one month. It&#x27;s just a simple click.

A one time contribution would be great - since I personally cannot afford sponsoring monthly.

What info can possibly prevent this fraud though? Even the real large projects could ask friends and family to donate 5k that they gift back later. It&#x27;s so easy&#x2F;undetectable to do it&#x27;s just leaving free money on the table.

Interestingly enough, Microsoft sponsored issues using GitCoin and paid out bounties in Dai.

I&#x27;m guessing part of the waitlist requires an application where they gather info for fraud prevention.I&#x27;m sure you&#x27;ll need to enter PII to send and receive payments -- MSFT doesn&#x27;t strike me as a BTC operation. Money laundering is illegal :).

What&#x27;s stopping me creating a sponsored project and donating myself $5,000 to get a free $5,000?

Finally, and they also allow to specify additional external funding platforms via .yaml file (no more wondering if a patreon account is legit or not).

GitHub is really on a roll lately. Another long awaited feature, if a little late.

Have you looked at other alternatives like OpenCollective or LiberaPay?Basically identical to what GitHub is now introducing, but with the nice feature of being open platforms and not seen as loss-leaders for their owner.

LiberaPay seems popular with developers. But Patreon is not unheard of either. The guy that codes Inkscape is on Patreon for instance.

Huh? Am I the only one that has exactly the opposite line of thinking? If I see an underfunded project that I enjoy, I’m much more likely to donate than if something already makes many digits money.

This logic is strange.If this repo receives $20 a month, if I donate $5 I&#x27;ll increase their budget by 1&#x2F;4, a huge impact.If this repo receives $500 a month, my $5 will increase their budget by 1%, barely visible.

Well what I&#x27;d like to do is establish a stack of budgets against a project, e.g. Kickstarter Goals.$500 p&#x2F;m = all hosting and domain costs paid for$750 p&#x2F;m = we&#x27;ll use some paid service that makes the service better in some way$1k p&#x2F;m = we&#x27;ll reward contributors $250 p&#x2F;m distributed across those who contributed to PRs but exact distribution determined by repo adminsAnd then to have a budget associated to the lowest one being the means for the project to survive... with a running total on that one, showing deficits (because I do have to still cover raw costs and those end up on my credit card the months I fall short, so future months should help recoup that).In this way, it would be extremely clear what funds a project needs to survive and how donations and support makes a difference.NB: My projects do fine... we get enough support to be viable. But damn it would be great to not manage it all manually, it&#x27;s a chore I&#x27;d like to give up so I can code more.

It would be really neat if the eventually introduce some type of dependency sharing.Ie, huge project X built on top of Y and Z show that 30% of donations go to Y and Z.If Github can start automatically recognizing dependencies it could also incentivize people to &quot;properly&quot; (whatever that means) share donations.

Funny, I act completely opposite to this with respect to Patreon. If I see content that I enjoy is only getting minor donations I&#x27;m very likely to donate, even if Patreon sponsorship doesn&#x27;t get me anything more. On the other hand, if a project has high donations I am unlikely to donate unless sponsorship gets me access to something additional, and even then I am more critical with the decision.I think GitHub is more like the first scenario. You&#x27;re already getting the content (code) regardless if you pay for support or not.I&#x27;m curious if, in the long term, GitHub will extend this functionality to integrate benefits: faster support, pay for features, even access to repos for various tiers.

&gt; visible &quot;this repo receives $500 per month&quot; it would encourage code contribution whilst providing visibility over the health of a project.I fear this might snowball. Many people don&#x27;t donate if they see a project with very small donations. It goes like this: &quot;well, my contribution would not make any difference anyway&quot;...The reverse is also true: &quot;this guy is OBVIOUSLY doing something right if he gets $500 a month for OSS work, I&#x27;ll donate!&quot;. Yet another example of whales vs. small fish.As you said in your edit, it will likely encourage celebrity cheering and everybody else won&#x27;t get a cent as before.

Well feel free to enable my GH account... @buro9 there too (verified by <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keybase.io&#x2F;buro9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keybase.io&#x2F;buro9</a> )

Hey, Devon here. :)&gt; 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&#x2F;repo&#x2F;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 -- devonzuegel@github.com.

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&#x27;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&#x2F;service nature.I am trying Browser Attention Tokens, but these feel to be detached from the delivery of code, and still don&#x27;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 &quot;this repo receives $500 per month&quot; 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&#x27;t use Github to subscribe to a recurring donation?Edit: Signed up for the waitlist, received a link to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.github.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;articles&#x2F;about-github-sponsors" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.github.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;articles&#x2F;about-github-sponsors</a> which appears to clarify that you&#x27;d be sponsoring a developer not a repo&#x2F;org... which means popularity&#x2F;celebrity is everything. Oh well.

You&#x27;re right I didn&#x27;t read that passage at first glance. In a year, both donation matching and 0 fees may very well be gone.

Keep in mind that they will only take a payment processing fee, unlike other services that charge a cut from the payment in order to pay for their services, or at least that is what it says for now.

&gt; GitHub Support does not take any fees and even matches donations... wow!Maybe I didn&#x27;t fully understand what &quot;cut&quot; means, but ....&gt; 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.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.github.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;articles&#x2F;about-github-sponsors" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.github.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;articles&#x2F;about-github-sponsors</a>

The big question is if they don&#x27;t take fees then how do they match the donations? This is clearly unsustainable.

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&#x27;s see how this pans out![1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opencollective.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opencollective.com&#x2F;</a>

I was really expecting GitLab to double down on features like this to attract floss community, but this coming from now Microsoft&#x27;s GitHub is trully surprising. I hope GitHub is working on some more social features as I feel like bringing back my project to GitHub more and more these days.That being I think it&#x27;s a great idea as we had many of bounty&#x2F;subscription tools but they always fail to get adopted and in general lack proper integrations with projects itself. 
Bounty integration in issue tracker has been on my wishlist forever now, can we get that going next?

&gt; Anyhow, I&#x27;m looking forward to see a similar feature implemented by Gitlab, even without the matching donations.You can check out this issue [1]. Please upvote it if you want to see this implemented, or join the discussion if you have any additional ideas.[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;gitlab-org&#x2F;gitlab-ce&#x2F;issues&#x2F;43468" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;gitlab-org&#x2F;gitlab-ce&#x2F;issues&#x2F;43468</a>

While seemingly good news and will definitely have positive side effects to open source projects, I cannot stop myself from questioning if this is just good old Microsoft using one of its edges over Gitlab (money) to come on top.After all, this is the embrace, extend, and extinguish company.Anyhow, I&#x27;m looking forward to see a similar feature implemented by Gitlab, even without the matching donations.

Wow! Long overdue. I&#x27;m not capable enough to contribute technically to the open source projects which I use. This will be a great way for me to make my contribution.Also, I do believe this is a plus for open source projects that often find it tough to stay afloat because of financial constraints.

This might be a deal-breaker not only from the developers&#x27; side but also from the business side. If the companies see that a project is well-funded, they can invest their time (maybe their money also?) more confidently. It might become a real marketplace at some point and let (some of the) open-source businesses to focus on their project rather than starting a company and dealing with boring business work.

I love the UX of GitHub and don&#x27;t get me wrong, I use and depend on GitHub for my day-to-day work and also my own hobbies.I do understand that people like it as well. It&#x27;s so easy to get started and it just works, most of the time.But it just doesn&#x27;t sit well with me, that we as open source developers, are depending on a platform that is closed-source for so much. I think I could see past that, if GitHub in itself was sustainable.But with the new owner who sees GitHub as a way to get marketshare of developers, and not as it&#x27;s own entity, it&#x27;s hard to continue to cheer on them. When Microsoft have to either increase profits&#x2F;decrease expenses and they choose between Azure and GitHub, I&#x27;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.

&gt; This point is brought many times. Why use GitHub if we can host git repositories anywhere? (A: GitHub providers discovery). Why use GitHub PRs if we have mailing lists? (A: GitHub has better UX).Using Github as a git repo hoster is okayish in the sense that it does not lock your code in. Using Github as a central management tool is problematic, but still manageable.But this introduces money into the game, and it&#x27;s dangerous. Github will be the gatekeeper for money flows. It&#x27;s the same for Patreon, but Patreon has less incentives to lock the whole Open Source ecosystem into their products (Github: hosting, code, issues, PRs, pages with CNAMEs!, package registry and now financial transactions).My bet is that due to the current state of the ecosystem, people will jump on it and forget that Microsoft is behind all of this. We need organisations which are forced to be open and collective to handle Open Source, not privately owned corporate.

(I made this comment in another Github related post, but to repeat:)If you view Github as just a Git (and occasionally static site) hosting service, then there&#x27;s not lock-in whatsover; you can always move to somewhere like Gitlab or host your own. But the point is: Github isn&#x27;t just a Git website anymore; it creates a community around it. Right now the reason why people aren&#x27;t easily moving out of Github is because by moving to somewhere else, they have to risk getting less views, less recognition, and less pull requests for their libraries. Also, if you were a Sponsor in Github and earning $30000 a month and then had disagreements with Github&#x27;s policies and want to get out, you now have to risk shaving off all your sponsors to switch to a different service like Liberapay. Maybe some of your passionate existing patrons will go towards the extra effort to switch alongside you, but the reality is: most won&#x27;t.There were lots of promises and hopes for the patron economy (or I would extend this to call it a &quot;distributed economy&quot;), where people can directly give money as reward for their work while avoiding the traditional hierarchical structure of corporations. However, because of the nature of the current society we live in, the ideal version of this economy would never come to fruition. Think of examples such as Patreon, Youtube, and recently Github; they&#x27;re an enabler for diverse communities, rich subcultures, and innovative ideas, but the users still have to live under the guise of huge capitalistic forces. It seems that the distributed economy still has to live under the current technocratic system (where huge tech corporations have much higher leverage than small companies or non-profit organizations). To see this relationship between users and corporations as either symbiotic or exploitative is up to your choice, but I think the status-quo will stay for quite some time.

&gt; Obviously, I&#x27;m a bit biased, as I run a project for creating transparent open source infrastructure. But I do think this is a important issue, and I&#x27;m getting more and more scared GitHub is out to make open source development more ivory tower-like.This point is brought many times. Why use GitHub if we can host git repositories anywhere? (A: GitHub providers discovery). Why use GitHub PRs if we have mailing lists? (A: GitHub has better UX).The same is with their Sponsors program, registering billing method and clicking on a button is all that&#x27;s needed. No separate sites with different UI.For the record I&#x27;m also not happy with the centralized structure of it (it reminds me of early Google), but I get why it&#x27;s getting popular.

Wrote the same in another comment.. it&#x27;s kinda brilliant but sad to watch at the same time. Microsoft&#x27;s Github guys are geniuses if this is a part of a long-running EEE strategy. And people fall for it, because they have no principles and values, on which they decide what&#x27;s good or damaging for Open Source.

Embrace and extend makes sense. But wrt the open source world, how does extinguish fit in?

I would really like to say that Microsoft is currently infiltrating the OSS world and pursuing their strategy, which they have successfully implemented dozens of times. Does anyone remember EEE[0]? If this is the case here, it would be the greatest successful coup in the history of the Internet.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;de.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Embrace,_Extend_and_Extinguish" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;de.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Embrace,_Extend_and_Extinguish</a>

I wrote something about the pattern of centralization&#x2F;decentralization in the context of Patreon: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kyefox.com&#x2F;patreons-future-venture-capital-is-bad-and-destinations-become-dead-ends&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kyefox.com&#x2F;patreons-future-venture-capital-is-bad-an...</a>GitHub is somewhere between 2 and 3 right now.

I agree.All the recent additions to Github are superficially very nice and convenient features (Actions, package registry, Sponsors, Dependabot).But they represent a very significant change in mindset. 
Github is turning from a neutral code hosting platform with a myriad of equally empowered third party integrations into the direction of a &quot;all in one&quot; dev tool and platform.I understand the internal pressures to do this: increased popularity, added value proposition for customers, more revenue.But: all the built-in tools will have an inherent advantage over third party solutions. 
This also inevitably leads to increased lock-in and homogenization.I was very critical of the Microsoft acquisition for similar reasons, and considering the monumental role Github represents for open source today, I am very sceptical of the way things are going.We might very well regret centralizing everything open source around Github in a few years.

Again, I&#x27;m biased but here comes my biased thoughts anyways:&gt; How does it matter that the donation platform is closed-source?Yes, I do think it does matter. Actually, I think that every open source service we open source developers depend on, should be open source and run in the open as much as possible.It&#x27;s great if a for-profit company can survive being 100% transparent and with all code open source. So far, that&#x27;s been very difficult to achieve, especially with the expectations from VC funding and high-growth startups.So instead, we need a different model for open source infrastructure, where the users are more involved in the funding of the platform. With that, users should feel they know what the money goes to and where it comes from. To solve that, the platform needs transparency.So yes, I&#x27;d argue that a core open source platform for open source developers, indeed needs to be open source and transparent.

&gt; they decide to build their own closed-source platformHow does it matter that the donation platform is closed-source? Open market principles still apply. People will (and should) use it as long as it&#x27;s easy, efficient, cheap to donate to whoever you wish to donate. If the platform misuses their dominance, people will figure out and alternatives will emerge&#x2F;thrive. Until then, why complicate things? Donation is not like a lock-in into some closed source technology.

&gt; An integrated payment solution is going to attract a far greater numbers of sponsors than telling everyone to go to sign up for a subscription on external sites.I agree, and I&#x27;m not saying GitHub should have just added a redirect to OpenCollective and called it a day.But they did have the choice to integrate OpenCollective. Basically, the same UI they have now, they could have built on top of OpenCollective, without any losses of features. But, they would have lost a lot of data and other interesting things that can help GitHub&#x2F;Microsoft develop other features in other services.And I&#x27;m sure it was a conversation on the product team (or whoever came up with it), but eventually got dropped for for some reason.

Perhaps this is all a ploy to encourage us to get our credit cards on file with Github? They don&#x27;t have my card details, and I don&#x27;t intend to change that. I&#x27;ll look for other means to donate to the open source projects I want to support, but it does not involve giving Microsoft Github my bank account details.

An integrated payment solution is going to attract a far greater numbers of sponsors than telling everyone to go to sign up for a subscription on external sites.Integrated authentication, existing credit cards on file, unified billing, giving more visibility to sponsors, allow projects to effectively monetize high traffic project pages with ad-space for sponsors and potential benefits like priority support is going to have a far larger impact for incentivizing funding and sponsorship than linking to a number of different external sites off to the side.I&#x27;m sure this is a welcome and long awaited feature for many devs who would love more funding around their OSS efforts.

I&#x27;m complaining about that this feature is not trying to improve the ecosystem long-term for open source developers.It&#x27;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.

I&#x27;m not sure what OP is complaining about. From GitHub&#x27;s announcement it&#x27;s clear that there&#x27;s also a new functionality to make it easy for projects to link to whatever funding platform they use. Open Collective is mentioned specifically:&gt; Open source projects can also express their funding models directly from their repositories. When .github&#x2F;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.&gt; 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 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.blog&#x2F;2019-05-23-announcing-github-sponsors-a-new-way-to-contribute-to-open-source&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.blog&#x2F;2019-05-23-announcing-github-sponsors-a-...</a>.

That&#x27;s a great idea! GitLab implementing native support for OpenCollective or similar would raise the bar significantly.

This would be something great for GitLab to jump on. A bit reactionary, but would be great for them to show support for a more open payment system.

Exactly. Always been like that and probably will always be like that.But still, we as open source developers, use and basically at this point, need to have GitHub still up and running. But they are at the whims of profit. GitHub is today a critical piece of open source infrastructure most of us rely on.Microsoft say they care about open source developers and now they are running the biggest platform for open source developers. They have the chance to turn GitHub into something that is not a profit-hungry monster, but they don&#x27;t seem to want to go that route.

&gt; First they introduce a Package Registry that not only splits the ecosystem in two parts but also has no open governance or even open source code.GitHub&#x27;s code has always been closed source. It&#x27;s a service, not software. It&#x27;s been like that since day one.

That&#x27;s fine and all. I&#x27;m not really involved in that side of things (consuming&#x2F;producing open source libraries) and I think that side of open source is working fine, albeit it could be better (like most things).What I&#x27;m mainly thinking about, is the running infrastructure. The live servers that are serving requests and providing a service to open source developers.Some of these services are just nice to have.Others are services we 100% depend on to get anything done nowadays.The npm Inc registry is a good example. Imagine that the registry disappears tomorrow. Probably most JS developers would struggle until a alternative becomes clear and most people migrate there.But just having the risk of having for-profit companies run these pieces of critical open source infrastructure, is a big risk for me as a open source developer.This open source infrastructure is what I&#x27;m scared about, because we basically have no good solutions yet, for running open source infrastructure.

I&#x27;m not saying &quot;open development&quot; is not important but your message reads like its dismissive of people with different goals.I&#x27;m a developer, I might create some tool for my needs and share it with others. I&#x27;ve got other income sources so there&#x27;s no need for me to charge money for it. I just put it on GitHub as the easiest thing I can do to allow others benefit from it.In some sense I would be open source developer. I don&#x27;t care about &quot;open development&quot; though, I don&#x27;t spend time pondering about software philosophy and its place in the world.If there&#x27;s a will to donate some money to me so I can justify spending some more time on the tool to make it more accessible in any way then I want the simplest way for both sides to facilitate the transaction.Same goes for me being on the other side. I see a library I&#x27;d like to use, I believe author(s) made a good job, I&#x27;d like the library to be maintained, I want to pay for that with as little traction as possible. I don&#x27;t care if the author created the library because he believes in &quot;free software&quot; or was simply bored and again, GitHub was the most convenient channel to share.The same way I don&#x27;t care what philosophy lies beneath music producer&#x27;s work and what tools do we use while I&#x27;m paying him for his tutorials as long as it works for both of us.

The problem here is not so much about open vs closed-source. GitHub is a large centralized social network controlled by corporation, and we should never expect a corporation to behave ethically because ethics too often contradict with commercial interests. There is so much possibility for abuse, they do censorship and there are ways in which they can discriminate against certain projects and licenses and promote others. Even if Microsoft or previous owners have not done anything bad with GitHub yet, it does not mean it is acceptable to give so much control and influence over the open-source community to a single commercial company.

Ugh, not again! First they introduce a Package Registry that not only splits the ecosystem in two parts but also has no open governance or even open source code. Great.
Now they are doing the same thing with donations. Instead of collaborating with already open platforms (like OpenCollective or LiberaPay), they decide to build their own closed-source platform.I love that more people are figuring out ways to pay open source developers, but doing it via a closed-source platform they developed on their own, they are effectively saying they don&#x27;t care about &quot;open development&quot;, they just want to be the one-stop for everything open source as to not lose mind-share of developers.I&#x27;d be wary of joining this program and I urge people to get involved with something like OpenCollective instead, which is a open project you can actually contribute to. It also helps that OpenCollective&#x27;s success is based on it&#x27;s members success. &quot;GitHub Sponsors&quot; isn&#x27;t as well aligned with you as a developer, as OpenCollective et al.Obviously, I&#x27;m a bit biased, as I run a project for creating transparent open source infrastructure. But I do think this is a important issue, and I&#x27;m getting more and more scared GitHub is out to make open source development more ivory tower-like.

This is the best thing to have happened to open source since GitHub has launched. Thank you to whomever has internally pushed for it!

To summarize,- OSS contributors on GitHub can apply to become &quot;sponsored developer&quot; to accept donations- Developer sets monthly sponsorship tiers (amounts &amp; benefits)- GitHub will match upto $5k in donation in Developer&#x27;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&#x2F;team support (on both sides) to come soon

Would be cool if there was an easy way to sponsor all the projects I&#x27;ve starred. Then I could just pay (say) $10 per month to &quot;support open source&quot;, without having to worry about any of the details such as picking projects.

Their content creator tools are shit. No integration with anything people use, and they are pretty buggy.They are capricious censors. I’d be fine with a platform articulating an arbitrary censorship policy and then following it. They don’t do thst — instead they just do what they want and justify it post hoc.They don’t have a real business model and they are too small to operate as a loss leader.

&gt; every aspect of Patreon is bad for creatorsWhy? What do you mean exactly?

This is great; it&#x27;s basically either 1) an alternative to Patreon for developers (which is something I have always wanted to exist) or 2) an alternative to Patreon for Patreon creators who are the tiniest bit intelligent and able to actually use GitHub (every aspect of Patreon is bad for creators, so this is an upgrade, except in user reach).The missing element here is a nice end-user focused browsing experience, layered on top. A user-focused portal which lets you subscribe to projects, sponsor them on GitHub, and see updates, with GitHub behind the scenes.

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.

On the other hand it provides a way to measure the performance of the people being sponsored. it&#x27;s a good fit.

Arguably, it&#x27;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.

Github&#x27;s TOS already contains highly questionable language about a &quot;license grant to us&quot;. I removed my code from Github when they added that, because I have no interest in risking giving Microsoft additional licenses to my software beyond those I give everyone.The $5k matching would not even pay for a lawyer&#x27;s time to review the current TOS and determine if that language in it actually does grant them an additional license.

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&#x27;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.

Or just include external donation links in the readme?

Then again I didn&#x27;t know about liberapay or OpenCollective up until now and I do open source for a living.

Yeah, it&#x27;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&#x27;t you just use GitHub as a mirror, and direct users elsewhere for actual development through the README?

&gt; If you want to get paid as a video creator, you better not leave Youtube eitherThat is of course Youtube&#x27;s message to creators. But platform-neutral competitors like Patreon are keeping them in check. I hope the same thing happens with Github.

&gt; 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&#x2F;nonprofits haven&#x27;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&#x27;t be a problem for Github&#x2F;MS to be solving here&gt; 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

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 think that’s a shame.

User only. Only a user has the payment setting in its configuration. But you can set it up via a custom tier, with a special amount per month, and divide it then amongst your org. Everything is public and transparent, so you got oversight.

Does this service work also per project or per user only?

The reason Twitch does all that stuff is because they are beholden to advertisers and nobody wants to be advertising on &quot;the site with all the white nationalists&quot; or whatever, it isn&#x27;t a good look. Github doesn&#x27;t have that issue since they do not have a model based on advertising

This is also about making developers behave.If you want to get paid on GitHub you shouldn&#x27;t commit anything controversial and you have to behave on the site. If they go full Twitch then they could take into consideration your actions outside the site. including posts on social media or at conferences.So we would first see those wikileak dumps, code leaks and vulnerability repos being got rid of first, then we might see right wing bloggers who code being denied monetisation. Who wants to see Nazis get funded? Or even perhaps if your code still uses slave and master and you won&#x27;t change then maybe repos can&#x27;t be sponsored.With monetization comes control. Opaque rules and decisions and no consistency. It won&#x27;t come in the first year but it will come soon enough after developers are fully invested into using it for their livelihoods.

Great to see GitHub is finally introducing a direct way to support OSS developers.Try IssueHunt (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;issuehunt.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;issuehunt.io&#x2F;</a>) as well! A open-source bounty platform for open source.
Great place for open source developers to earn extra cash!

I am seeing this trend of asking or indicating one&#x27;s preferred pronoun more and more.I find asking people how they would like to be referred to as a really positive thing and I fail to see any downside for this trend.And since this is optional, nobody is forced to answer the question.

From the signup page :&gt; What are your preferred pronouns? (optional)So this is actually happening ?

I feel the same way, honestly. Thinking of it in a different way - torvalds and gregkh get paid by the Linux Foundation. Say it went bankrupt, they would surely need to get other jobs, unless they were sponsored by the community. Many developers of the kernel today are sponsored by their employers. The question is, how many of them would do it (out of sheer enthusiasm) if they aren&#x27;t getting paid to?

I&#x27;d argue that money&#x27;s been in OSS since its inception.To try to put a number on it, here&#x27;s a random study that 50% of oss is people at their paid job: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dirkriehle.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;08&#x2F;22&#x2F;paid-vs-volunteer-work-in-open-source&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dirkriehle.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;08&#x2F;22&#x2F;paid-vs-volunteer-work-in-...</a>But anecdotally that number is consistent with my experience.When we created the GNOME Foundation in 2000, it was in part to manage the commercial vendors and money involved (Compaq, Eazel, Helix Code, IBM, Sun Microsystems and VA Linux Systems, see the press release <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnome.org&#x2F;press&#x2F;2000&#x2F;08&#x2F;red-hat-joins-industry-vendors-as-a-founding-member-of-the-gnome-foundation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnome.org&#x2F;press&#x2F;2000&#x2F;08&#x2F;red-hat-joins-industry-v...</a>).This was not at all unique to GNOME, same kinda stuff around all the major projects at that time.One thing I think is new and constructive is more ways to pay maintainers without asking them to join a giant company.

Who&#x27;s forcing anything? It&#x27;s op-in. I welcome our capitalist overlord with open-arms if they want to sponsor my volunteer work. It&#x27;s a win-win scenario.

Sorry to bring my ethical and philosophical view on the subject but I don&#x27;t agree with forcing a capitalist system to something that is essentially volunteer work.Open source has worked fine being just volunteer for the past several decades. In fact I&#x27;d argue it&#x27;s one of the only ecosystem that keeps on being awesome. I don&#x27;t think adding money to the equation will change any of this. In fact it might risk making it worst.

It&#x27;s an interesting idea but I wonder what will make this different than gittip from years ago, or gratipay, or Patreon, or just having a &quot;donate&quot; button in your README file.I guess I&#x27;m just skeptical in that this will change anything for the developers who are trying to make some type of income for their contributions.On a related note, DHH recorded a very nice keynote at Railsconf 2019 on expectations of payments in open source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=VBwWbFpkltg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=VBwWbFpkltg</a>

Great case of Dogfooding. Contribute here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;liberapay.com&#x2F;LiberapayOrg&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;liberapay.com&#x2F;LiberapayOrg&#x2F;</a>

Is that something different than &quot;An independent zero fee platform run entirely on altruism&quot;? My critique of those want particularly strong: basically &quot;nice if it works, but will it?&quot;.I have to admit that it looks kind of promising now, but at current funding levels the organisation could still disappear faster than a Google API. And if it was more successful a new threat could become visible at the horizon, the failure mode of uncontrolled bloat, funded basically by threatening to allow an important institution to disappear. (Yes I&#x27;m talking about you, Wikimedia)PS: thanks for bringing it up, looks interesting!

What about the Liberapay model? The platform is just one explicit project to which you can donate, just like any other. It&#x27;s not a tax, nor running only on the creators&#x27; donations.

Maybe they meant credit card interchange fees of 1-3%?

From a few pages deeper:
&gt;In the future, we may charge a nominal processing fee.That might be where they&#x27;re headed, but from their diction I&#x27;m guessing they plan to try and keep this part of their business cost neutral. Who knows, maybe this is part of the ol&#x27; embrace extend extinguish, but I&#x27;m guessing they value the goodwill above the money in this case.

No, they will take much less than Patreon. They will only charge the Stripe fees, which are much lower. And they will withhold nothing for Github by themselves, only for Stripe, their payment processor.

&gt;GitHub will not charge fees for GitHub Sponsors. And to celebrate the launch, we’ll cover payment processing costs for the first year, too! One-hundred percent of your sponsorship goes to the developer.My reading is that they&#x27;re only going to forgo the fees for the first year, and after that it&#x27;s going to be basically similar to Patreon in terms of where the money goes.

I think it&#x27;s a very compelling deal: under the patreon model (company takes a cut to fund the funding mechanism), the &quot;platform tax&quot; 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&#x27;s clear that both ends of the transaction &quot;pay&quot; by adding relevance to the platform, but that&#x27;s a positive sum game.

This is a game changer for people like me, who do a lot of open source work, but might not have the pockets to sustainably continue putting in so many hours each week (i.e. students).

No, it would be immoral, which is why I would not do it, but I&#x27;m also sure a lot of people won&#x27;t have that problem.

Well then you’d be stealing...that’s a real downside to me.

I&#x27;d be tempted to sign up and just donate $5k to myself to get the 100% match.... #freemoney

Won&#x27;t a restrictive license mean fewer users, and thus fewer sponsors?

This... doesn&#x27;t make much sense. An open-source license (one that is actually recognized as such by OSI[0]), means that anyone can fork the code and contribute to it at the very minimum. The only way to stop this would be to use a non open source license (or none at all, making it effectively source-available), but nobody would want to donate to someone making only source-available or closed-source projects.The reality is that people would just have to choose, unfortunately.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensource.org&#x2F;licenses" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensource.org&#x2F;licenses</a>

Say a sponsored developer Bob has some software, that another person, Alice forks. The fork becomes wildly more successful than the original for some reason, and Bob loses many sponsors in the course of time. Would a situation like this force developers to use restrictive licenses? 
(I get that Bob can just integrate Alice&#x27;s fork into his original - assume that it&#x27;s too much work for Bob to do so)

Great news! I hope this will enhance the development of many great open source projects.This has already been discussed at GitLab and it would be nice if something similar is implemented on other platforms as well. Here&#x27;s the issue with more details <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;gitlab-org&#x2F;gitlab-ce&#x2F;issues&#x2F;43468" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;gitlab-org&#x2F;gitlab-ce&#x2F;issues&#x2F;43468</a>

@Github&#x2F;Microsoft feature request:It would be nice to see sponsorship or bounties for individual issues in Github.

No, it gives the owners of the team&#x2F;org the ability to distribute funds as they wish. There should be no friction.

otoh, sponsoring developers avoids the friction between teams about how to share sponsorships etc. they should offer both though

this would a slam dunk if you could sponsor projects or organizations besides just developers. if that happened, this would destroy patreon and paypal in the donation space for OSS projects.

I would absolutely sponsor issue&#x27;s. It&#x27;d be a great way to lure people into a longer term sponsorship.

Great feature! Something to consider for the feature which would allow us to donate more is:
1) Sponsor a project rather an individual developer
2) Sponsor a specific issue&#x2F;bug

To be fair, it&#x27;s us who created this problem, not Microsoft. GitHub was too central long before Microsoft acquired it.

Microsoft is gonna centralize the sh*t out of the eco-system. Let&#x27;s see how it goes this time.

They should also launch one-off contributions for people who want particular features . Still a great move , and loooong overdue, i hope it succeeds massively.

GitLab actually has an open source SCM that you can selfhost.

Well damn, this is sneaky and I love it. I say sneaky, because I was in a situation where I mentally debated Github vs Gitlab. This tips it a bit towards Githubs favor. Not that I&#x27;m even planning on being sponsored or w&#x2F;e, but simply that I already view GH as a social network for a thing I love (code), but now it seems even more.. socially.. if that makes sense.Purely my perception of course.

This would be nice if there was some integration between the two.

&gt; doing your own service but building it open source and as a open platformWhy would they ever do this? Practically nothing they do is Open Source.

Hello there Devon!I&#x27;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?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.github.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;articles&#x2F;sponsoring-a-developer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.github.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;articles&#x2F;sponsoring-a-developer</a>

Really excited for this new feature!Would the sponsorship be a subscription model or can you also do a one time payment donation?

Would be great if they could get Stripe on board with this and support 0 fees due to the application.

$1 &#x2F; month is already one of the options.

Will this support micro payments like $1 or even $0.10 a month? Or would credit card fees eat all that up?

1 - I can imagine sending money to every country isn&#x27;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&#x2F;noisy and create unhealthy competition?

This would be a nice feature, less overhead for the donator too as the amount donated can automatically be split up among all of your starred projects. Bonus points to offset a sponsor dashboard where you can use a slider to change the percentage splits. In the future a budget feature can be added for sponsored projects and this dashboard can show which projects haven&#x27;t yet met their budget for the month or quarter, similar to the banners that show on wikipedia, &quot;this is an open source project and need x amount in order to keep operations going smoothly, if everyone donates y amount that will fund development for z time period.&quot;

Am I using stars wrong? I have starred 771 projects on GitHub. To me, a star means anything from &quot;I use this&quot; to &quot;I think this is a cool project&quot;. Giving $10 a month to 771 projects would result in about a penny for each project.I&#x27;d rather separate starred from sponsored. If I could select a subset of that 771 and say &quot;split $10 among these projects&quot; then I&#x27;d be happy.

This is interesting, but it raises questions, mainly: if a project is abandoned and you&#x27;ve still given it a star, does it continue to send money to it? Will it cause people to un-star projects?I could see having some kind of &quot;tip amount&quot; per project that gets taken from a pool would make a lot of sense, but not as stars.

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&#x27;ve starred. Then I could just pay (say) $10 per month to &quot;support open source&quot;, 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 &quot;hey, there&#x27;s someone who&#x27;d sponsor you&quot;, then I feel this could significantly increase the uptake of this feature on both the sponsor and the maintainer side.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19990110" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19990110</a>

GitHub is vetting applicants. If they do get hoodwinked, they are at least getting hoodwinked into giving money to somebody they thought was doing worthwhile work to begin with.

How many sponsoring circles have you detected already ?I can&#x27;t believe people able to be sponsored aren&#x27;t doing background stuff to make sure they get free $5K a month from github, since it&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t you worried about this, is this just cost of doing business, or are you actively detecting it ? (and how if discloseable ?)

This is a brilliant idea whose time has come, and I&#x27;m looking forward to seeing how it plays out.I&#x27;m especially looking forward to seeing how it plays in the corporate arena; I&#x27;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&#x27;re planning on encouraging this behavior!

Can an organization get sponsored instead of an individual?

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?[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;natfriedman&#x2F;status&#x2F;1103919494894772226" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;natfriedman&#x2F;status&#x2F;1103919494894772226</a>

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 devonzuegel@github.com as well.

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&#x27;re a maintainer, ctrl-f through this list and see if you&#x27;re in there: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.tidelift.com&#x2F;is-your-package-eligible-for-income-on-tidelift-heres-the-complete-list-may-2019" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.tidelift.com&#x2F;is-your-package-eligible-for-incom...</a>Tidelift is also supported via the new GitHub Sponsors feature:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tidelift.com&#x2F;subscription&#x2F;how-to-connect-tidelift-with-github" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tidelift.com&#x2F;subscription&#x2F;how-to-connect-tidelift-wi...</a>If you aren&#x27;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).

Imagine you’re a solo maintainer of an NPM package, and you know that one of the FAANG companies uses your package. Normally, you respond to issues on weekends and cut new builds when reasonable bugs are reported.Then, the FAANGco starts sponsoring you, a pittance for them but a solid amount for you. They put in issues and submit PRs that are intended for their own use case, or even worse, that constrain the utility of the package to that company’s use case.Other people put in issues, but let’s be real, they’re not sponsoring you.A maintainer can reject an issue or PR from a sponsor to keep the package pure and generalized, but would risk getting that sponsorship revoked. And if you don’t think coercion would be involved in that, think again.It is FOSS so someone could fork it. But then, you’ve got a situation where potentially tens of thousands of projects and consumers would have to switch over.All straw men for sure, but I am thinking that the ecosystem of FOSS might be shook by this, from both the maintainer and consumer side.

I’m excited about this but fearful that it will create unfair (I.e. monetary) incentive structures for FOSS maintenance.

It would be interesting to see if most of the people who are cautious&#x2F;guarded&#x2F;hostile about this are older people who&#x27;ve seen Microsoft work their &quot;magic&quot; before.

Perhaps you don&#x27;t mind it, but it would be interesting to know more about GitHub&#x27;s and Microsoft&#x27;s thoughts&#x2F;thought process on this topic.

Idk, you can abuse everything. Does that mean nothing that could be abused should exist?I expect them to at least verify that you&#x27;re doing some useful work on GitHub. If you are, I don&#x27;t even particularly mind you exploiting this, even if it&#x27;s perhaps not ideal.

Why would it be fraud? We both contribute to open source projects and appreciate the effort that the other contributes.

Well, that would be fraud and illegal.Other than that, nothing. What&#x27;s stopping you from conning an old lady out of her pension?

When joining the waitlist, they ask about a variety of open source projects you&#x27;ve been involved in. I imagine they&#x27;ll vet what kind of contribution level people did on different repos they claim, or just on open source repos in general.

KYC: know your customer.AML: anti money-laundering.Basics:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Know_your_customer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Know_your_customer</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Money_laundering" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Money_laundering</a>

Epic Games is doing stuff like this in order to own the concept of a video-game storefront. I don&#x27;t think Microsoft would go quite so far as to subsidize massive fraud just to get people engaged with this scenario, but they&#x27;re clearly prepared to throw some money at it.

If Github aren&#x27;t doing KYC and AML, then their payment processor better have. Otherwise this is the swiftest way I&#x27;ve seen to make $5K.

&quot;me&quot;, I mean &quot;another github user&quot;, I mean &quot;anyone on the internet who wants to create a github account &amp; start cashing in.&quot;This feature really makes no sense, either they figure the fraud will be low enough to not matter, or there&#x27;s some oversight mechanism to prevent it. I am certain they don&#x27;t want to try to sue ten thousand random people to attempt to claw back $5k each. I imagine there&#x27;s some flag&#x2F;approval process.

&gt; 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&#x27;s to stop me^Wsomeone else and their friend from sponsoring each other for $5K to collect the $5K in matching funds?

This is real nice to see. I Sponsor hzoo through patreon but may do it through GitHub sponsors. Babel is a great project.What i’d really love to see is GitHub bounties though. Like you want a feature bad or a bug fixed because you depend on it. You can assign it some monetary value. GitHub is the escrow. When the bug&#x2F;feature is done and verified by people who put the bounty, it gets paid out to the implementors.

While I understand why others are wary, I am also excited about the good that this could do for OSS projects.I know I&#x27;ve struggled in the past to give money to projects that make me a profit. The third party tools are hardly brilliant, and maintainers have to set them up, and look after them.This has the potential to be a really good thing.

This is such a watershed moment in the history of software development that I don&#x27;t think most of us can grasp its significance yet. Sure we&#x27;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&#x2F;work on top of. And this is not just limited to the entrepreneurial devs out there, of which &quot;the man&quot; has new employment competition with now. It can also fund entire company departments.I look forward to mass adoption of this, wallet in hand.