cool feature but putting the burden of funding on individuals vs companies is supporting what I call the "open source gig economy" - doesn'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
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.
"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."
> 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.
"growth" -- for a company that is nothing more than an intermediary with a well-established platform. What do they need to grow for? If anything, it's time for some cuts actually.
Sounds like that's plenty to cover wages of £60k ($80k USD) gross, which is double the median graduate salary in the UK. I guess compared to what people earn in SV it's pocket change?
I love this. It's actually huge, but I wonder why you have to apply for a waitlist in order to be able to get sponsored? Why wouldn't we be allowed to sponsor anyone? I suppose it has something to do to prevent money laundry?
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?
> This seems like it'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's obvious the feature they are now introducing is not for making the ecosystem better, but to lock the ecosystem harder to GitHub.
Please don't break the site guidelines by making insinuations about astroturfing or shillage. It's a toxic trope that people bring up as cheap ammunition in arguments, and unless you have something approaching real evidence, it's off topic.
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.
So, for me that indicates that the problem is not that there is any service for making payments, but rather that open source developers who lives on donations, needs to be paid more by more people.
It would be cool if GitHub integrated with existing platforms and helped that to happen. Instead, they signal nothing about this problem and shipped yet-another platform.
They could have easily have contributed to solving the problem for real, but instead go their own way.
From GH’s perspective, why would they create a dependency on an open service (that could disappear at any moment) when they could roll their own? Especially with all the trust issues that come around payments.
Are there any guarantees that Liberapay could even handle an integration at GH scale without it falling over? They opened 900 accounts last month.
GitHub’s promise is something akin to ‘it just works’ - which means that they take care of this stuff rather than give you yet another tool to integrate with.
GH can’t win in this scenario with some people. GH invest in Liberapay, give it a coat of paint, these same people will then complain that Liberapay has ‘sold out’ / gone ‘too enterprise’ (see Chef, Docker) (or the Microsoft variant - Oh noes, MSFT is working with open source tech it must be EEE) and demand that GH integrate with the next half-baked service with a Bootstrap website.
> why would they create a dependency on an open service (that could disappear at any moment) when they could roll their own?
Because by creating the dependency on an open service and collaborating with them, they help them survive long term and to not disappear at any moment.
Yes, it's nice that "it just works" but sometimes the easiest way of doing something doesn't mean it's the right way. Especially when it comes to hard things like "How do we ensure open source developers can get paid?"
Having worked with human beings before, I would say that it is considerably easier and more predictable if you just do some things yourself.
Working with folks outside of your employ (even if you pay them good money to do the work) will fail you far more often than working with one or more of your own employees.
I can't blame GitHub for doing this completely in-house.
Sure, the easy way is easier. But more often than not, the easiest way is not the best way for the entire ecosystem.
Rather than saying "How can we get money moving around on our platform as soon as possible?" they should have asked "How can we make open source work sustainable?".
But who can blame them really, it's a for-profit and closed source company on every level.
> It would be cool if GitHub integrated with existing platforms and helped that to happen
They did that as well today today with support for a .github/FUNDING.yml. This file lets people provide links to Open Collective, Patreon, Community Bridge, Tidelift, Ko-Fi, a custom link and they show up as alternative sponsoring options for a repo: https://github.blog/2019-05-23-announcing-github-sponsors-a-....
Doing this took ten years of operating as a commercial entity earning respect, and then ramping up my productivity hugely to compensate for earning about a quarter what I'd be making as a commercial entity. On the other hand, it's predictable and steady, whereas operating as the commercial entity proved wildly unpredictable and stressful in a whole different, darker way.
UX is fine but the platform will never give people a survivable income by itself. You need to build a business like any other, and then be able to take a MASSIVE hit to your income for the sake of your principles.
I'm happy with my choices but other people really can't do likewise. Certainly not from scratch: you wouldn't gain enough traction. I work in the music business. There's a saying, how do you earn a million dollars running a recording studio? Start with ten million. It's a lot like that, and no payment platform is really going to help.
The Patreon product is 10% payment processing and 90% the marketing/branding/placement/ease-of-use/trust/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.
OpenCollective for example, being developed via their own platform, need to make sure the platform is sustainable, and can't just throw cash wherever they want to gain marketshare.
The result is a sustainable funding platform that will survive for as long as people fund it.
GitHub on the other hand, can develop the wrong features, spend too much, give cash away and a whole bunch of other things, while not actually achieving sustainability in itself in the long-term. Microsoft will cover all of this, until they wont.
I have never heard of OpenCollective, but I have been using Github for 10 years. And “collective” in the name scares me because it makes me feel like it’s a bunch of street artists squatting in a warehouse in Oakland — perhaps fun and nice people, but not the type of people I’d want to trust with distributing money and compliance.
But GH in this space will mean OSS developers will start to get paid for real, the phenomenon will grow and become standard and expected, and if GH stops doing it, the need for it will be so clear and people's expectation of having such a product so strong, that any drop in replacement service will instantly convert most users to their platform.
GH right now is growing the market by bringing millions of eyes onto this problem. The same as Patreon did. And if Patreon dies today, do you think no one will bring up an alternative? And that supporters won't transition with creators to that platform?
It's the same idea as Paypal creating and growing the e-payment system. Down the line, the market of e-payment has grown enough and is legitimized enough that if Paypal was to stop service, there'd be plenty of alternatives, and people are already using plenty of alternatives.
OpenCollective and the likes haven't been growing this market the way GH will be doing, and the result is only a net positive for OSS and developers.
> Seems what they are planning to offer is not better nor different than what others already are providing (see OpenCollective or LiberaPay).
It'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'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.
I guess our perspectives are different. You seem to see this from GitHubs point of view, I'm seeing it from the view of open source developers. Both perspectives are equally valuable.
I see this from the perspective of someone who wants to see developers get paid. Safely and securely, in a way that makes it easy for them to get paid the next time too.
I'm also looking at this from the angle of "What non-nefarious reasons would GitHub have for making these decisions?". One of the first that sprang to mind is credit card security, which touches on quite a few issues at once.
Further, my experience is that most of the time decisions that can be interpreted as being done for nefarious reasons were rarely actually made that way. I am willing to extend the HN-guideline principle of charity to GitHub, especially because I can see clear, real, valid reasons for standing up their own service over a partnership with a third-party service. I understand that some people will find these unconvincing or decide they are just a ploy.
I haven't even touched on AML or KYC issues!
You are definitely right about the importance of infrastructure made entirely of open source software. My perspective is, in essence, that there are other features that matter that may not fully live in code.
I think the key perspective here is that of “the average GitHub user who mostly ends up there in the process of attempting to fetch a library” (a.k.a. to use GitHub as the ecosystem-library package manager of last resort, for libraries nobody bothered to put into an actual package; or for special feature-branches or tracking bleeding-edge development.)
If such users will be more attracted to donating to developers via GitHub itself, than via other systems linked to through the GitHub README they land on, then donations will spike.
And if, at some point, this program becomes opt-out instead of opt-in, then these users might decide to donate to all sorts of people who never considered themselves “open-source developers” but who just happen to slap code up on the internet for free, mostly as a way of proving the provenance of the binary releases they make. For example, developers in the game-console homebrew community, or the Hackintosh driver community, might suddenly see financial support.
You make a good point. I sponsor a couple of projects on opencollective, but it took an hour or so of reading before I trusted it enough to use. I think if it had been built into GitHub, I would have been much quicker to sponsor.
I agree with diggan’s point too, but the reality is this is likely to get more people paying more open source maintainers. I just wish it could be on an open platform.
It could be. Letting GitHub get away with this without criticism feels like a failure of imagination. They could have done integration of an open platform (heck, even one they created) if they gave a fuck :(
The way I see it, it isn't an alternative to Open Collective that they're after. They've seen that it's fashionable for people to give money based on parasocial interaction. It's sort of like gambling, where there's a dopamine hit, but where the behavior doesn't get you meaningfully more involved with the community, whether it be Twitch, YouTube, or Facebook (just like gambling doesn't make you wealthier). I fell into that trap with Twitch for a while but cancelled all my subscriptions after realizing that my rationalizations for subscribing didn't hold up, and the real reason was the excitement of feeling like I was hanging out with a chess champion. I think there will probably be backlash after some stories of people spending more they can afford on Twitch subscriptions get out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction
It is nice to see people make money doing what they love, but I wonder how much they can really make if people aren't influenced by parasocial interaction.
The motivation for Open Collective of giving back to say thanks is a much more pure one than paying $5/mo on Twitch, of which Amazon gets a huge cut, to get a sense of belonging bolstered by custom emoji and subscriber-only programming.
> It'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.
Yes, and they are absolutely _robbing_ the opportunity from others to build in this space, when there are already some really capable players who would have gotten somewhere great. This is a total asshole, closed source company approach. The "loss leader" thing feels totally malicious, and designed to starve the open competition. This is classic Microsoft and rolls back all the positive feelings that had been growing about their growing in the right direction. Amazon does the same shit, to starve competition: "Yeah, you've a spot on our system, but we're going to steal every feature and embed our deeper and drive you out."
For a real example of how OPEN companies work together: Balanced Payments was a daring effort to run an open source payment processor. When they wanted a way to fund and support Gratipay, they went in and submitted a pull request to incorporate their own open source payment processor into the Gratipay platform. If GitHub were in the true spirit of open source, it would have engaged OpenCollective in such a capacity.
I am really disappointed about the hooray optimism and lack of criticism in this thread. I feel like we're all failing to engage in critical engagement with this idea and premise.
Your comment reads that you're angry at Github for not taking a more open source approach. That's a fine opinion to have, but it doesn't make sense to demonize them for being a for-profit company. They are not robbing anyone of anything.
Starving the competition with loss-leader tactics is not an unbeatable strategy. If, however, you don't have anything to offer other than a run of the mill payment processing platform, then yea, you're going to have a tough time beating someone who can cut costs. They have a feature you don't, you should lose.
What kind of critical engagement do you think we are failing to offer? What kind of response would leave you thinking "This person engaged critically with the issue at hand, but still came away with a strongly positive position"?
For my own part, I don't think anybody is owed a position in a space. I also don't think the existence of small players that get displaced by a big player means that the small players were destined to become big players. It's worth considering that LiberaPay and OpenCollective would never have gotten somewhere great. Perhaps they would always have been doomed to be small and essentially irrelevant. We'll never know, obviously, but it's worth considering.
But let's talk about OpenCollective and how Github could have worked with them. Do you think OpenCollective would have passed a security audit? Are they SOC compliant? Could they have handle the scale?
An even more interesting question: has Github ever claimed to be an OPEN company? I'm certainly not aware of such, though of course my knowledge is less than comprehensive. Charging them with failing to be something that they've never claimed to be seems odd.
Yes. Your charge is correct in an important detail. Github isn't an open source company. As far as I can tell they never have been. It's perhaps somewhat less than maximally reasonable to expect them to become one.
For my own part, this enhances my positive feelings about Microsoft running Github. They're making changes to popularize the idea that it's OK to pay developers to do open source, and doing so in a way that lets developers get paid in a manner of their choice.
It could still be an open platform, of course. Someone just needs to be able to do it better than Github. As Dependabot shows, that's absolutely possible.
> I also don't think the existence of small players that get displaced by a big player means that the small players were destined to become big players. It's worth considering that LiberaPay and OpenCollective would never have gotten somewhere great. Perhaps they would always have been doomed to be small and essentially irrelevant.
I think the difference between small and big players depends also on what their goals are. If the goals of (first Gratipay and then) Liberapay are to fund cool people and cool work, it doesn't matter how much of the funding space they take up as long as they're paying the bills and surviving. If the goal of GitHub is to make $$$ on fees, then yeah, they're going to feel like every other platform is a threat to that goal.
IMHO, there is much more space for different multiple funding platforms than people realize.
> It could still be an open platform, of course. Someone just needs to be able to do it better than Github. As Dependabot shows, that's absolutely possible.
That's actually exactly my point. Dependabot did Github security alerts so much better than Github did, that Github gave up on trying to compete entirely.
Which is to say that it's incontrovertibly possible to beat Github at their own game and on their own platform. To the point where even Github agrees they've been beat.
> 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 'sponsor' right in the github profile. That's a big emphasis.
Will such shift 'hurt' the FOSS contribution? I'm not sure because the answer depends what we mean by 'hurt'. But I fear that it's not going to be quite the same.
Interesting. I agree that it'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.
> 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'd also be concerned about features being implemented because there's money behind it, forgoing more important technical reasons.
Of course there are many projects that already implement this 'quid pro quo' development strategy, and open source projects with big corporate backers. How do these projects currently handle monetary influence in their decision making?
> Do companies use GitHub sponsorships to judge the health of dependencies? Will they create budgets to support their dependencies systematically?
In my past I've worked with multiple places that absolutely loved open-source. Because to them it was "free". 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/contribute; no matter how administratively trivial it became.
I'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.
I like open source software projects and use them extensively on behalf of my employer. I care that they are healthy.
That said, there is a huge difference between getting authorization to spend company money on a subscription or support contract (easy), vs. getting authorization to donate company money to a person, informal group or nonprofit (extremely difficult).
A license or support contract is easy for the lawyers to understand, easy for procurement to understand, easy for finance to understand. That's how work gets done at a corporation, and they do those types of deals all day. Depending on the amount, I can sometimes turn around approval in hours.
A donation is not "how work gets done". It has no strings attached, which looks scary to lawyers and finance and PR folks. In my company at least, donations have a separate approval path that loops in the PR and corporate citizenship folks... and they want to see that money go to something fuzzy and feel good, like a charity. "Donations" is a line in the budget; it's not a big one and it's not mine.
So, I still think that the way forward for open source projects who want financial support from companies is to organize somehow (incorporate, nonprofit, etc) and sell support subscriptions. This aligns very well with how the corporation manages other dependencies, like office space, phone service, etc.
> Often these opportunistic parasites would never contribute anything back
So 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.
Yeah I disagree that the users have to contribute something back. Half the value of a project comes from the users. The other half comes from the developers. If no one uses your software then it's worthless and it wouldn't matter if you spent all day playing video games instead. If someone else does end up using your software and builds a business around it and you don't like it then you should either start a business yourself or alternatively think of your work as returning the favor to all the other open source developers who have worked for free and will benefit from your project directly or indirectly by making proprietary software cheaper.
I disagree. Before the acquisition, the work on GitHub was to make GitHub sustainable in it'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.
So your argument is that because GitHub no longer has a profit motive and they're now releasing features at a much faster pace, that the acquisition has somehow gone bad?
The Argument is that it's bad for the market, as it makes it hard for competitors which aren't part of such a large company and hence need to make profit.
And basically every free product released by large companies which prioritizes mass distribution and user base over direct product cost. It definitely makes it much harder for the few remaining competitors but also benefits the far greater number of users.
They definitely have a competitive advantage where they're able to build and give away features for free to attract larger mind-share, but it's also the playbook of most large companies with freemium or gateway products. Not seeing why Microsoft needs to limit themselves to the same constraints as their less resourceful competitors.
VC funding has nothing to do with it. It’s an argument against the business practice of leveraging monopoly in one market to subsidize selling at a loss in other markets to kill off competition before it can even emerge. That is what Microsoft appears to be doing with Github, and it is overall a bad thing for everyone except Microsoft. We will get less choice in the markets poisoned by Microsoft, and in the long run we will get less value for a higher cost.
By the way, this is not just about Microsoft. Google, Amazon, and to a lesser degree Apple and Facebook are equally guilty of this.
Why would Microsoft prioritize development and improvements of GitHub when they don't earn a profit from it?
When (in the future) Microsoft needs to earn more profits, they have to make a choice.
Either they improve GitHub and get more developers on board with X.
Or, they improve their Cloud Hosting service, which actually improve profits.
Since GitHub is basically just a cost (with the hopeful promise of future returns of developer mindshare) while Azure makes profit, it's much more likely Microsoft will focus on improving Azure before GitHub.
I would bet on there being a intense internal competition between Github and the Azure dev tool stack right now.
All the new products Github is introducing are exactly designed to increase the value proposition for paying customers and bind/lure them to the platform instead of them going with AWS/Azure/Google dev tools.
This will increase revenue for Github, and is probably in part driven by internal pressure to make Github profitable.
The issue is not one of "monetization" vs. "non-monetization", but one of priorities being driven primarily by the interests of a corporate surveillance capitalist owner rather than what's healthy for the community.
Google's agendas (advertising, amp, etc.) are clear in the design decisions taken for Chrome, and slowly we're beginning to see analogous prioritisation come to GitHub. Expect more to come in time.
It'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'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't bet on them personally but it'll be fun to watch either way!
As someone who was around 10 years ago I'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.
Maybe for your use case, but there are plenty of basic applications for which it works fine, if a little slow. The WSL2 implementation should make it fully competitive option for lightweight tasks like frontend web dev and introductory programming - if MS's figures on performance improvements are accurate.
WSL replacing Linux in the near future is, as you say, not a serious concern. But it being a viable alternative for a portion of the people who would normally use desktop Linux is quite realistic, I think. What say?
When it is released it will likely be as buggy as WSL is today. WSL is over 20x slower due to Microsoft's crappy filesystem. They are still using a custom kernel even though it is a VM now. I don't have high hopes about their terminal either.
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.
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't issue it to anyone, they don't receive their sum back. There there currency is points, but if it's real money, any unreleased bounties could go to some kind of general community pot for that project or whole Github after a while.
This 1000x. I spoke to a designer at GitHub specifically about this a few years ago. Their initial concern was over-complicating the UI/UX. There's no doubt they've discussed this internally and I'm very curious what the hold up is.
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.
I also think it's about sustainability. As a developer receiving an X amount every month (+/- Y%) can heavily reduce the financial risk and help plan better.
I'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'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.
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'd only receive monthly payments and people wouldn't be able to send you one-time payments.
Even better (imo), try to buffer one time payments over months. This (and other similar features) could allow a developer to see upcoming income from OSS, if it's declining, etc.
Being able to predict how much you're going to make it hugely helpful imo. Especially if you're a freelancer. You might see that in 3 months your funds are drying up, so plan accordingly.
Just brainstorming: But "similar features" could be trying to favor longer term donations. If a user wants to donate $20/m, maybe ask them for $10/m for 3 month increments?
Though, I suppose this isn't any better than the developer themself buffering funds in their bank. BUT, it seems like a meaningful concept, regardless.
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's income and lets them plan for the future accordingly, which is always a good thing.
I only have experience in non-development creative work, but one-off payments/donations are much more anxious than monthly. Sales of t-shirts/songs/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's even worse now with everything moving to SaaS. It'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've been there for months or a year.
2: I didn'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'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'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.
This is my experience as well. I'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's good. Being a small business person can be brutal and it doesn'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.
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's so easy/undetectable to do it's just leaving free money on the table.
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.
> visible "this repo receives $500 per month" it would encourage code contribution whilst providing visibility over the health of a project.
I fear this might snowball. Many people don't donate if they see a project with very small donations. It goes like this: "well, my contribution would not make any difference anyway"...
The reverse is also true: "this guy is OBVIOUSLY doing something right if he gets $500 a month for OSS work, I'll donate!". Yet another example of whales vs. small fish.
As you said in your edit, it will likely encourage celebrity cheering and everybody else won't get a cent as before.
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.
The person you replied to tried to highlight why that particular framing a bad metric to highlight in an OSS project.
People respond better to something like:
this repo needs $500/mo to achieve X;
$1000/mo to achieve Y and;
$2000/mo to achieve Z. We have received $200 in funding for this month."
rather than the example given above:
"this repo receives $500 per month"
The first framing emphasizes your needs, the second framing emphasizes your current situation. The first is better because it gives any potential donor actionable information to decide whether you need a donation or not, and more importantly, how much impact their donation will make if they choose to donate.
A donor can make an out-sized impact on a project with a stretch goal of "$2000/mo to achieve Z" that has only received $200 in donor funds by providing the $1800 balance for instance.
Many people who get paid this way prefer the 1% case to the 25% case. It's much more stable. This means if you decide to stop, they only lose 1%, not 25%.
I mean, people are still going to enjoy getting more money, don't get me wrong. But they'd rather have 1000 people giving a dollar than two people giving 500.
Exactly your last. We could all take a page out of the Twitch streamers' books -- they do exactly like this: (a) set donation or subscription goals and (b) make it really cheap and (c) aim for volume.
Well what I'd like to do is establish a stack of budgets against a project, e.g. Kickstarter Goals.
$500 p/m = all hosting and domain costs paid for
$750 p/m = we'll use some paid service that makes the service better in some way
$1k p/m = we'll reward contributors $250 p/m distributed across those who contributed to PRs but exact distribution determined by repo admins
And 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's a chore I'd like to give up so I can code more.
I'm sure it's possible to put that info in README.md and handle things according to that month's donation amount.
I don't know that a GitHub-run tier system will suit everyone, when a developer (the primary users of GH, of course) could easily just automate the update of the relevant info in the README or some other relevant document in the repo on a cadence that suits the project and the developer.
>If Github can start automatically recognizing dependencies
I think that they already do this for JavaScript, Ruby, and Python dependencies[0]. However I don't think doing it automatically is the way to go, one dependency may be "worth" way more than another, and some dependencies may go undetected (e.g. if I conditionally sneak -lfoo into my LDLIBS somewhere)
Yea, definitely agree about automatically. For me the biggest problem with automatic is, exactly as you said, the worth of varying projects.
I think automatic inclusion would also run the risk of OSS becoming less integrated. Ie, if I include another dependency I risk losing money, incentivizing me to reinvent wheels so long as I have the ability.
Funny, I act completely opposite to this with respect to Patreon. If I see content that I enjoy is only getting minor donations I'm very likely to donate, even if Patreon sponsorship doesn'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're already getting the content (code) regardless if you pay for support or not.
I'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.
I'm exactly like you but my anecdotal evidence shows that we are the minority.
And yep, I'd like to see those same additional features. One-off small payments instead of a recurring donation is a must as well; many can't afford to donate on a regular basis.
> 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 -- devonzuegel@github.com.
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!
> GitHub Support does not take any fees and even matches donations... wow!
Maybe I didn't fully understand what "cut" means, but ....
> 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.
If they only charge the card processing fee I'd say that's still pretty darn good.
Although I wouldn't necessarily be mad if they charged more than that. The incentives seem to align pretty well. GH makes money when people support OSS.
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.
>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...
a cut from the payment in order to pay for their services = additional fee on top on payment processing fee to cover operational expenses, employee salaries etc.
That's charitable. Nowhere do they say that their "payment processing fee" will be limited to the fees charged by their payment processor. They could very well charge some multiple of that value to generate a profit.
Credit Processing fees pay the bank/processing fees charged to Github. The Patreon “cut” pays processing fees but it also pays for Patreon’s electric bill, employee salaries, rent, profit.
Github already has the bills paid by paid GitHub accounts. So adding this is simply another feature and the only new real cost to this feature is credit card processing fees. If there are other costs (extra employees, etc.,) that could be counted as a marketing expense.
I was really expecting GitLab to double down on features like this to attract floss community, but this coming from now Microsoft'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's a great idea as we had many of bounty/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?
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'm looking forward to see a similar feature implemented by Gitlab, even without the matching donations.
Wow! Long overdue. I'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' 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.
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't care about "open development", they just want to be the one-stop for everything open source as to not lose mind-share of developers.
I'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's success is based on it's members success. "GitHub Sponsors" isn't as well aligned with you as a developer, as OpenCollective et al.
Obviously, I'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'm getting more and more scared GitHub is out to make open source development more ivory tower-like.
> Obviously, I'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'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's needed. No separate sites with different UI.
For the record I'm also not happy with the centralized structure of it (it reminds me of early Google), but I get why it's getting popular.
I love the UX of GitHub and don'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's so easy to get started and it just works, most of the time.
But it just doesn'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's own entity, it's hard to continue to cheer on them. When Microsoft have to either increase profits/decrease expenses and they choose between Azure and GitHub, I'm pretty sure the effort will either be to decrease the expenses of GitHub, or increase the profits of Azure. None of those two ways are good for the users of GitHub in the long-term.
> 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's dangerous. Github will be the gatekeeper for money flows. It'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's not lock-in whatsover; you can always move to somewhere like Gitlab or host your own. But the point is: Github isn't just a Git website anymore; it creates a community around it. Right now the reason why people aren'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'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't.
There were lots of promises and hopes for the patron economy (or I would extend this to call it a "distributed economy"), 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'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.
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.
Wrote the same in another comment.. it's kinda brilliant but sad to watch at the same time. Microsoft'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's good or damaging for Open Source.
Get developers locked in to a centralized ecosystem like GitHub, spread the marketing far and wide you use tools based on centralized platforms, encourage developers to utilize frameworks and programming languages that have poor support for open source platforms, etc.
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 "all in one" 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.
> they decide to build their own closed-source platform
How 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'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/thrive. Until then, why complicate things? Donation is not like a lock-in into some closed source technology.
Again, I'm biased but here comes my biased thoughts anyways:
> 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's great if a for-profit company can survive being 100% transparent and with all code open source. So far, that'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'd argue that a core open source platform for open source developers, indeed needs to be open source and transparent.
> 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.
I am myself a proponent of open source, but I don’t think it is reasonable to expect that this is going to happen.
Who contributes to open source?
To my knowledge, open source contributors can be divided into the following groups:
- People volunteering their own time.
- Companies open sourcing software they themselves developed, bought the rights to or got the rights to through aquiring another company.
- Companies contributing their bug fixes and feature additions to existing open source software. (Sometimes overlaps with previous group, sometimes not.)
- Non-profit organizations.
- People employed by educational institutions.
- Governmental institutions.
And the motivations that these groups have for contributing to open source vary wildly. Both from group to group but also within each of the groups as well.
Some of the possible motivations include:
- Believing in the ideals of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).
- Wanting to share cool stuff.
- Wanting to help others learn.
- Wanting to empower your fellow developers.
- Wanting to be empowered and in control of the software you run. Wanting freedom. Wanting to be able to run your software for any purpose and wanting to be able to modify your software in any way. Wanting to be able to run the software that you use today, tomorrow. Wanting to be in control of your data.
- Wanting to learn from others.
- Wanting to offer consulting other other paid services for people using your open source software, software that you contribute to, or software that you are skilled at using, modifying or integrating.
- Wanting the improvements that others outside of your company could bring to your software by you open sourcing it.
- Wanting to use existing, battle-tested open source software where you can instead of duplicating work and wasting hours while putting you at a competitive disadvantage compared to other businesses that make use of open source instead of needlessly reinventing the wheel.
- Wanting recognition from your peers.
And a million other motivations probably exist as well, but the ones I mentioned are the most obvious ones I can think of.
Given the list above, I think you will agree that a lot of the people involved in open source have no reason or motivation to reject the ongoing centralization.
Only if Microsoft does something with GitHub that has visibly negative effects on the specific motivations that someone has for contributing to open source will that person or group of people object.
My point is: Open source as a whole is moving in a direction counter to the one desired by some, such as yourself. For others it might not yet. And for yet others it might never. It all depends on why the person or the group of people is in open source in the first place.
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'm sure this is a welcome and long awaited feature for many devs who would love more funding around their OSS efforts.
> 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'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/Microsoft develop other features in other services.
And I'm sure it was a conversation on the product team (or whoever came up with it), but eventually got dropped for for some reason.
Why would they limit themselves to the features of integrating multiple external sites when they can build the features, integration, velocity and product direction they want without being beholden to external stake holders with different values and motivations.
GitHub's effectively the home of OSS development, with great UX and design aesthetics, they definitely don't need to delegate for help in building out their own product.
The only stake holders who would benefit by redirecting to external sites, are the external providers themselves as it would end up with a worse UX and fragmented and limited experience, which is exactly what you don't when wanting to attract sponsorship, it should be as easy, seamless and integrated as possible.
Microsoft have two choices with the direction of GitHub:
Use it as a loss-leader to get developer mindshare and get more people to use what they actually get a profit from, Azure and others.
Or, they can use GitHub to build a open platform for the entire ecosystem.
What of these two options are the best for users of the platform? I'm sure one option is better for the shareholders of Microsoft/GitHub, but I'm more interested in the value for the users, many who are open source developers.
Of course, they don't have to collaborate with the rest of the ecosystem. But if they were truly interested in making the open source ecosystem better, without any compromises, they would have built something different than what was launched today.
> The only stake holders who would benefit by redirecting to external sites, are the external providers themselves
Sure, if you think of it as OpenCollective vs GitHub. But in the end, open source developers are the ones who should be benefiting from whatever choice they make (that's my naive hope at least). And the choice they made was to improve short-term mindshare, in front of long-term open source sustainability.
For me, GitHub have become an essential open source infrastructure project. But, the platform itself is nowhere near open, and every new feature they seem to be launching, is closed-source and _aims_ to fracture the existing ecosystems the feature touches.
> Use it as a loss-leader to get developer mindshare
Right, that's why they paid 7.5B to acquire GitHub and are further investing in it to be more appealing to developers and gain even more mind share.
> Or, they can use GitHub to build a open platform for the entire ecosystem.
Is that code for not shipping developer focused features they've released since acquiring GitHub? Most of the features like free private repos and package repositories have been well received.
> What of these two options are the best for users of the platform?
For users, definitely all the features they're taking advantage of now that didn't exist before.
> Sure, if you think of it as OpenCollective vs GitHub.
I'm purely viewing it from the developer's perspective on what would attract more funding/sponsorship, which is by far the more convenient and integrated solution for all reasons already mentioned in my previous comments above.
I view this as a massive potential that could spur on a whole new wave of sustainable OSS development similar to what YouTube/Twitch are doing for content creators. This was never a consideration of GitHub before but with this announcement it's now become a strategic focus which I hope will be continually improved on over time.
Perhaps this is all a ploy to encourage us to get our credit cards on file with Github? They don't have my card details, and I don't intend to change that. I'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.
Does Github and Microsoft have a habit of stealing money from people? I’d be more worried about giving my info to some random open source “collective” group that has considerably less experience with compliance and security.
The down votes you have should indicate the general opinion here, but;
Microsoft's takeover of GitHub is generally considered in the open source community as a negative.
After all, Microsoft's behaviour indicates a generally opposing ideology.
With regards privacy, Microsoft is up there with the worst of them (a la Facebook) with their telemetry, at the very least.
Beyond that, Microsoft has a ( perhaps rightly so) capitalist agenda which doesn't fit with open source.
In case you missed the mass exodus from GitHub on the announcement of their takeover, those that value the freedoms of Libre generally are not in favour of a Microsoft GitHub.
Giving GitHub your bank details can be reasonably synonymised with giving Microsoft your bank details and giving them a cut of the money you intended to give to a developer.
At this point, all the additions to GitHub that Microsoft are making, demonstrate how disconnected they are from that community.
Alternatives such as open collective are quite well regarded in this community and their ideology aligns like Microsoft's never will.
Worse comes to worse, you can ask a developer for a PayPal, Bitcoin or plain old bank details and just send money straight you them.
I'm not saying there are not those for whom this will be of value, but GitHub as-was is no more and ideally if some neutral party willing to host an open source, libre alternative were to show themselves, or would be more desirable than a Microsoft GitHub, for this community.
To present my anecdotal example; I don't run Windows, I don't have an Xbox, I don't have my bank details in GitHub; Microsoft is up in the top-list of companies that don't (willingly) get my bank details.
I'm not sure what OP is complaining about. From GitHub's announcement it's clear that there's also a new functionality to make it easy for projects to link to whatever funding platform they use. Open Collective is mentioned specifically:
> Open source projects can also express their funding models directly from their repositories. When .github/FUNDING.yml is added to a project’s master branch, a new “Sponsor” button will appear at the top of the repository. Clicking the button opens a natively rendered view of the funding models listed in that file.
> The YAML format is flexible, so a project’s maintainers and contributors can decide how they want to fund the project on their own terms. They can showcase any (or all!) of the following: the GitHub Sponsors profiles of the developers who contribute to the project; a list of popular funding models including Open Collective, Community Bridge, Tidelift, Ko-fi, and Patreon; and custom links to alternative funding models.
I'm complaining about that this feature is not trying to improve the ecosystem long-term for open source developers.
It's great that you can now have a fancier link to OpenCollective. Thank you for that, Githubbers who are reading the HN comments. But it feels like smoke-and-mirrors.
The real announcement is the other, built-in funding platform they built. Which, if they wanted to, could have been built entirely on something open, instead of their own stuff. There is no special features that for example OpenCollective does not already have.
Instead they (not surprisingly) continue to walk down the path of closed platforms, while cheering for open source.
> It's great that you can now have a fancier link to OpenCollective. Thank you for that, Githubbers who are reading the HN comments.
It improves discoverability, which is important enough that it's a big part of why people use GitHub. It might just be me, but that seems like it might benefit open source developers no matter what platform they use.
In the short-term, I think a lot of open source developers will get funding, who might not have gotten it otherwise. But I'm not too optimistic of a future where GitHub, as a closed platform, basically owns open source.
Copying from another comment I made:
> But with the new owner who sees GitHub as a way to get marketshare of developers, and not as it's own entity, it's hard to continue to cheer on them. When Microsoft have to either increase profits/decrease expenses and they choose between Azure and GitHub, I'm pretty sure the effort will either be to decrease the expenses of GitHub, or increase the profits of Azure. None of those two ways are good for the users of GitHub in the long-term.
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't seem to want to go that route.
Because Microsoft is a profit-hungry monster and their "adoption" of open source was the only way they could stay alive longer. It never had to do with doing what is good for humanity.
I'm not saying "open development" is not important but your message reads like its dismissive of people with different goals.
I'm a developer, I might create some tool for my needs and share it with others. I've got other income sources so there'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't care about "open development" though, I don't spend time pondering about software philosophy and its place in the world.
If there'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'd like to use, I believe author(s) made a good job, I'd like the library to be maintained, I want to pay for that with as little traction as possible. I don't care if the author created the library because he believes in "free software" or was simply bored and again, GitHub was the most convenient channel to share.
The same way I don't care what philosophy lies beneath music producer's work and what tools do we use while I'm paying him for his tutorials as long as it works for both of us.
That's fine and all. I'm not really involved in that side of things (consuming/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'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'm scared about, because we basically have no good solutions yet, for running open source infrastructure.
I understand that and that's why I haven't said there's anything wrong with your opinion or that I disagree.
Yes, we'd all love to have our tools (repository, package hosting, CIs, ...) both satisfying our needs and be free of whims of for-profit companies.
Some of us simply don't care that much as long as what we have now works and I just wanted to append that to the conversation.
That's why I only said that your messagereads like... and not assumed you really believe the service is bad in overall just because it's bad within scope of one aspect that's close to your heart. :)
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.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 390 ms ] threadhttps://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-...
[0]: https://www.clojuriststogether.org/
What do you mean? What's wrong with Patreon?
“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."
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/crowd-funding-platform-patre...
"growth" -- for a company that is nothing more than an intermediary with a well-established platform. What do they need to grow for? If anything, it's time for some cuts actually.
Whether or not it'll work is an open question.
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?
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's obvious the feature they are now introducing is not for making the ecosystem better, but to lock the ecosystem harder to GitHub.
People will wake up when Nadella has moved all jobs to India.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It would be cool if GitHub integrated with existing platforms and helped that to happen. Instead, they signal nothing about this problem and shipped yet-another platform.
They could have easily have contributed to solving the problem for real, but instead go their own way.
Are there any guarantees that Liberapay could even handle an integration at GH scale without it falling over? They opened 900 accounts last month.
GitHub’s promise is something akin to ‘it just works’ - which means that they take care of this stuff rather than give you yet another tool to integrate with.
GH can’t win in this scenario with some people. GH invest in Liberapay, give it a coat of paint, these same people will then complain that Liberapay has ‘sold out’ / gone ‘too enterprise’ (see Chef, Docker) (or the Microsoft variant - Oh noes, MSFT is working with open source tech it must be EEE) and demand that GH integrate with the next half-baked service with a Bootstrap website.
Because by creating the dependency on an open service and collaborating with them, they help them survive long term and to not disappear at any moment.
Yes, it's nice that "it just works" but sometimes the easiest way of doing something doesn't mean it's the right way. Especially when it comes to hard things like "How do we ensure open source developers can get paid?"
Working with folks outside of your employ (even if you pay them good money to do the work) will fail you far more often than working with one or more of your own employees.
I can't blame GitHub for doing this completely in-house.
Rather than saying "How can we get money moving around on our platform as soon as possible?" they should have asked "How can we make open source work sustainable?".
But who can blame them really, it's a for-profit and closed source company on every level.
They did that as well today today with support for a .github/FUNDING.yml. This file lets people provide links to Open Collective, Patreon, Community Bridge, Tidelift, Ko-Fi, a custom link and they show up as alternative sponsoring options for a repo: https://github.blog/2019-05-23-announcing-github-sponsors-a-....
Doing this took ten years of operating as a commercial entity earning respect, and then ramping up my productivity hugely to compensate for earning about a quarter what I'd be making as a commercial entity. On the other hand, it's predictable and steady, whereas operating as the commercial entity proved wildly unpredictable and stressful in a whole different, darker way.
UX is fine but the platform will never give people a survivable income by itself. You need to build a business like any other, and then be able to take a MASSIVE hit to your income for the sake of your principles.
I'm happy with my choices but other people really can't do likewise. Certainly not from scratch: you wouldn't gain enough traction. I work in the music business. There's a saying, how do you earn a million dollars running a recording studio? Start with ten million. It's a lot like that, and no payment platform is really going to help.
If GitHub Sponsors is stronger at whatever-it-is-that-makes-people-donate, that would be their advantage.
OpenCollective for example, being developed via their own platform, need to make sure the platform is sustainable, and can't just throw cash wherever they want to gain marketshare.
The result is a sustainable funding platform that will survive for as long as people fund it.
GitHub on the other hand, can develop the wrong features, spend too much, give cash away and a whole bunch of other things, while not actually achieving sustainability in itself in the long-term. Microsoft will cover all of this, until they wont.
GH right now is growing the market by bringing millions of eyes onto this problem. The same as Patreon did. And if Patreon dies today, do you think no one will bring up an alternative? And that supporters won't transition with creators to that platform?
It's the same idea as Paypal creating and growing the e-payment system. Down the line, the market of e-payment has grown enough and is legitimized enough that if Paypal was to stop service, there'd be plenty of alternatives, and people are already using plenty of alternatives.
OpenCollective and the likes haven't been growing this market the way GH will be doing, and the result is only a net positive for OSS and developers.
It'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'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.
I see this from the perspective of someone who wants to see developers get paid. Safely and securely, in a way that makes it easy for them to get paid the next time too.
I'm also looking at this from the angle of "What non-nefarious reasons would GitHub have for making these decisions?". One of the first that sprang to mind is credit card security, which touches on quite a few issues at once.
Further, my experience is that most of the time decisions that can be interpreted as being done for nefarious reasons were rarely actually made that way. I am willing to extend the HN-guideline principle of charity to GitHub, especially because I can see clear, real, valid reasons for standing up their own service over a partnership with a third-party service. I understand that some people will find these unconvincing or decide they are just a ploy.
I haven't even touched on AML or KYC issues!
You are definitely right about the importance of infrastructure made entirely of open source software. My perspective is, in essence, that there are other features that matter that may not fully live in code.
As long as Microsoft is being altruistic here, we should be fine.
I think.
If such users will be more attracted to donating to developers via GitHub itself, than via other systems linked to through the GitHub README they land on, then donations will spike.
And if, at some point, this program becomes opt-out instead of opt-in, then these users might decide to donate to all sorts of people who never considered themselves “open-source developers” but who just happen to slap code up on the internet for free, mostly as a way of proving the provenance of the binary releases they make. For example, developers in the game-console homebrew community, or the Hackintosh driver community, might suddenly see financial support.
I agree with diggan’s point too, but the reality is this is likely to get more people paying more open source maintainers. I just wish it could be on an open platform.
It could be. Letting GitHub get away with this without criticism feels like a failure of imagination. They could have done integration of an open platform (heck, even one they created) if they gave a fuck :(
It is nice to see people make money doing what they love, but I wonder how much they can really make if people aren't influenced by parasocial interaction.
The motivation for Open Collective of giving back to say thanks is a much more pure one than paying $5/mo on Twitch, of which Amazon gets a huge cut, to get a sense of belonging bolstered by custom emoji and subscriber-only programming.
Yes, and they are absolutely _robbing_ the opportunity from others to build in this space, when there are already some really capable players who would have gotten somewhere great. This is a total asshole, closed source company approach. The "loss leader" thing feels totally malicious, and designed to starve the open competition. This is classic Microsoft and rolls back all the positive feelings that had been growing about their growing in the right direction. Amazon does the same shit, to starve competition: "Yeah, you've a spot on our system, but we're going to steal every feature and embed our deeper and drive you out."
For a real example of how OPEN companies work together: Balanced Payments was a daring effort to run an open source payment processor. When they wanted a way to fund and support Gratipay, they went in and submitted a pull request to incorporate their own open source payment processor into the Gratipay platform. If GitHub were in the true spirit of open source, it would have engaged OpenCollective in such a capacity.
I am really disappointed about the hooray optimism and lack of criticism in this thread. I feel like we're all failing to engage in critical engagement with this idea and premise.
Starving the competition with loss-leader tactics is not an unbeatable strategy. If, however, you don't have anything to offer other than a run of the mill payment processing platform, then yea, you're going to have a tough time beating someone who can cut costs. They have a feature you don't, you should lose.
Because some people are just born as for-profit companies?
Labels are useful to classify behaviour, but that doesn't automatically excuse that behaviour.
For my own part, I don't think anybody is owed a position in a space. I also don't think the existence of small players that get displaced by a big player means that the small players were destined to become big players. It's worth considering that LiberaPay and OpenCollective would never have gotten somewhere great. Perhaps they would always have been doomed to be small and essentially irrelevant. We'll never know, obviously, but it's worth considering.
But let's talk about OpenCollective and how Github could have worked with them. Do you think OpenCollective would have passed a security audit? Are they SOC compliant? Could they have handle the scale?
An even more interesting question: has Github ever claimed to be an OPEN company? I'm certainly not aware of such, though of course my knowledge is less than comprehensive. Charging them with failing to be something that they've never claimed to be seems odd.
Yes. Your charge is correct in an important detail. Github isn't an open source company. As far as I can tell they never have been. It's perhaps somewhat less than maximally reasonable to expect them to become one.
For my own part, this enhances my positive feelings about Microsoft running Github. They're making changes to popularize the idea that it's OK to pay developers to do open source, and doing so in a way that lets developers get paid in a manner of their choice.
It could still be an open platform, of course. Someone just needs to be able to do it better than Github. As Dependabot shows, that's absolutely possible.
I think the difference between small and big players depends also on what their goals are. If the goals of (first Gratipay and then) Liberapay are to fund cool people and cool work, it doesn't matter how much of the funding space they take up as long as they're paying the bills and surviving. If the goal of GitHub is to make $$$ on fees, then yeah, they're going to feel like every other platform is a threat to that goal.
IMHO, there is much more space for different multiple funding platforms than people realize.
Awkward, this literally happened today: https://dependabot.com/blog/hello-github/
(I agree with the thrust of your comment; I just think the timing here is funny.)
Which is to say that it's incontrovertibly possible to beat Github at their own game and on their own platform. To the point where even Github agrees they've been beat.
Everyone with a big report for your OSS project is already on your Github page. Its perfect.
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 'sponsor' right in the github profile. That's a big emphasis.
Will such shift 'hurt' the FOSS contribution? I'm not sure because the answer depends what we mean by 'hurt'. But I fear that it's not going to be quite the same.
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.
I'd also be concerned about features being implemented because there's money behind it, forgoing more important technical reasons.
Of course there are many projects that already implement this 'quid pro quo' development strategy, and open source projects with big corporate backers. How do these projects currently handle monetary influence in their decision making?
In my past I've worked with multiple places that absolutely loved open-source. Because to them it was "free". 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/contribute; no matter how administratively trivial it became.
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.
That said, there is a huge difference between getting authorization to spend company money on a subscription or support contract (easy), vs. getting authorization to donate company money to a person, informal group or nonprofit (extremely difficult).
A license or support contract is easy for the lawyers to understand, easy for procurement to understand, easy for finance to understand. That's how work gets done at a corporation, and they do those types of deals all day. Depending on the amount, I can sometimes turn around approval in hours.
A donation is not "how work gets done". It has no strings attached, which looks scary to lawyers and finance and PR folks. In my company at least, donations have a separate approval path that loops in the PR and corporate citizenship folks... and they want to see that money go to something fuzzy and feel good, like a charity. "Donations" is a line in the budget; it's not a big one and it's not mine.
So, I still think that the way forward for open source projects who want financial support from companies is to organize somehow (incorporate, nonprofit, etc) and sell support subscriptions. This aligns very well with how the corporation manages other dependencies, like office space, phone service, etc.
So 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.
This is one step away from consumers being able to put bug bounties on issues too
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.
If only they would release something similar to GitLab Runner a.k.a. GitHub Runner it would be golden!
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.
They definitely have a competitive advantage where they're able to build and give away features for free to attract larger mind-share, but it's also the playbook of most large companies with freemium or gateway products. Not seeing why Microsoft needs to limit themselves to the same constraints as their less resourceful competitors.
It only benefits users in the short term. The consequences of monopoly catch up with all of us, eventually.
By the way, this is not just about Microsoft. Google, Amazon, and to a lesser degree Apple and Facebook are equally guilty of this.
Is that really an issue?
How much did has Google's non-monetization of Chrome hurt the product vs helped it?
Why would Microsoft prioritize development and improvements of GitHub when they don't earn a profit from it?
When (in the future) Microsoft needs to earn more profits, they have to make a choice.
Either they improve GitHub and get more developers on board with X.
Or, they improve their Cloud Hosting service, which actually improve profits.
Since GitHub is basically just a cost (with the hopeful promise of future returns of developer mindshare) while Azure makes profit, it's much more likely Microsoft will focus on improving Azure before GitHub.
And as a GitHub user, that idea makes me worry.
I would bet on there being a intense internal competition between Github and the Azure dev tool stack right now.
All the new products Github is introducing are exactly designed to increase the value proposition for paying customers and bind/lure them to the platform instead of them going with AWS/Azure/Google dev tools.
This will increase revenue for Github, and is probably in part driven by internal pressure to make Github profitable.
Because they also use it for their own works.
Developers, developers, developers.
Google's agendas (advertising, amp, etc.) are clear in the design decisions taken for Chrome, and slowly we're beginning to see analogous prioritisation come to GitHub. Expect more to come in time.
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.
Unlike Google, it seems Microsoft (Satya) isn'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.
WSL replacing Linux in the near future is, as you say, not a serious concern. But it being a viable alternative for a portion of the people who would normally use desktop Linux is quite realistic, I think. What say?
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.
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.
I'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'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.
Being able to predict how much you're going to make it hugely helpful imo. Especially if you're a freelancer. You might see that in 3 months your funds are drying up, so plan accordingly.
Just brainstorming: But "similar features" could be trying to favor longer term donations. If a user wants to donate $20/m, maybe ask them for $10/m for 3 month increments?
Though, I suppose this isn't any better than the developer themself buffering funds in their bank. BUT, it seems like a meaningful concept, regardless.
This decreases the variation in the developer's income and lets them plan for the future accordingly, which is always a good thing.
also i wouldn't want to be listed as a sponsor in case the dev wound up doing something controversial(as Opensource devs are wont to do)
I'd drop a lot of money on a particular docker feature that hasn't been dealt with for the last 3 years running.
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's even worse now with everything moving to SaaS. It'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've been there for months or a year.
2: I didn'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'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'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'm sure you'll need to enter PII to send and receive payments -- MSFT doesn't strike me as a BTC operation. Money laundering is illegal :).
A further step towards turning Open Source into a popularity contest, which is needed to destroy it.
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.
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.
I fear this might snowball. Many people don't donate if they see a project with very small donations. It goes like this: "well, my contribution would not make any difference anyway"...
The reverse is also true: "this guy is OBVIOUSLY doing something right if he gets $500 a month for OSS work, I'll donate!". Yet another example of whales vs. small fish.
As you said in your edit, it will likely encourage celebrity cheering and everybody else won't get a cent as before.
I was just commenting what I have been witnessing over the years is all.
If this repo receives $20 a month, if I donate $5 I'll increase their budget by 1/4, a huge impact.
If this repo receives $500 a month, my $5 will increase their budget by 1%, barely visible.
The person you replied to tried to highlight why that particular framing a bad metric to highlight in an OSS project.
People respond better to something like:
this repo needs $500/mo to achieve X;
$1000/mo to achieve Y and;
$2000/mo to achieve Z. We have received $200 in funding for this month."
rather than the example given above:
"this repo receives $500 per month"
The first framing emphasizes your needs, the second framing emphasizes your current situation. The first is better because it gives any potential donor actionable information to decide whether you need a donation or not, and more importantly, how much impact their donation will make if they choose to donate.
A donor can make an out-sized impact on a project with a stretch goal of "$2000/mo to achieve Z" that has only received $200 in donor funds by providing the $1800 balance for instance.
I mean, people are still going to enjoy getting more money, don't get me wrong. But they'd rather have 1000 people giving a dollar than two people giving 500.
$500 p/m = all hosting and domain costs paid for
$750 p/m = we'll use some paid service that makes the service better in some way
$1k p/m = we'll reward contributors $250 p/m distributed across those who contributed to PRs but exact distribution determined by repo admins
And 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's a chore I'd like to give up so I can code more.
I don't know that a GitHub-run tier system will suit everyone, when a developer (the primary users of GH, of course) could easily just automate the update of the relevant info in the README or some other relevant document in the repo on a cadence that suits the project and the developer.
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 "properly" (whatever that means) share donations.
I think that they already do this for JavaScript, Ruby, and Python dependencies[0]. However I don't think doing it automatically is the way to go, one dependency may be "worth" way more than another, and some dependencies may go undetected (e.g. if I conditionally sneak -lfoo into my LDLIBS somewhere)
[0]: https://github.blog/2017-11-16-introducing-security-alerts-o...
I think automatic inclusion would also run the risk of OSS becoming less integrated. Ie, if I include another dependency I risk losing money, incentivizing me to reinvent wheels so long as I have the ability.
I think GitHub is more like the first scenario. You're already getting the content (code) regardless if you pay for support or not.
I'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.
And yep, I'd like to see those same additional features. One-off small payments instead of a recurring donation is a must as well; many can't afford to donate on a regular basis.
> 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 -- devonzuegel@github.com.
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/
Maybe I didn't fully understand what "cut" means, but ....
> 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.
https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-github-sponsors
Although I wouldn't necessarily be mad if they charged more than that. The incentives seem to align pretty well. GH makes money when people support OSS.
How are those different exactly?
a cut from the payment in order to pay for their services = additional fee on top on payment processing fee to cover operational expenses, employee salaries etc.
The second may or may not be a loss leader, but it will contribute something in revenue for the business to stay afloat.
Github already has the bills paid by paid GitHub accounts. So adding this is simply another feature and the only new real cost to this feature is credit card processing fees. If there are other costs (extra employees, etc.,) that could be counted as a marketing expense.
That being I think it's a great idea as we had many of bounty/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?
After all, this is the embrace, extend, and extinguish company.
Anyhow, I'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] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/43468
Also, I do believe this is a plus for open source projects that often find it tough to stay afloat because of financial constraints.
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't care about "open development", they just want to be the one-stop for everything open source as to not lose mind-share of developers.
I'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's success is based on it's members success. "GitHub Sponsors" isn't as well aligned with you as a developer, as OpenCollective et al.
Obviously, I'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'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's needed. No separate sites with different UI.
For the record I'm also not happy with the centralized structure of it (it reminds me of early Google), but I get why it's getting popular.
I do understand that people like it as well. It's so easy to get started and it just works, most of the time.
But it just doesn'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's own entity, it's hard to continue to cheer on them. When Microsoft have to either increase profits/decrease expenses and they choose between Azure and GitHub, I'm pretty sure the effort will either be to decrease the expenses of GitHub, or increase the profits of Azure. None of those two ways are good for the users of GitHub in the long-term.
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's dangerous. Github will be the gatekeeper for money flows. It'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.
If you view Github as just a Git (and occasionally static site) hosting service, then there's not lock-in whatsover; you can always move to somewhere like Gitlab or host your own. But the point is: Github isn't just a Git website anymore; it creates a community around it. Right now the reason why people aren'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'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't.
There were lots of promises and hopes for the patron economy (or I would extend this to call it a "distributed economy"), 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'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.
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_Extend_and_Extinguish
2) Control top performers by pitching GitHub self-promotion experts with an agenda against them.
3) Make top performers leave OSS because the atmosphere has become hostile to meritocracy.
4) Try to take over existing code bases by hiring developers.
5) Make those developers push the above points inside "their" project (the key parts of which have usually been written by others).
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 "all in one" 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.
GitHub is somewhere between 2 and 3 right now.
How 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'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/thrive. Until then, why complicate things? Donation is not like a lock-in into some closed source technology.
> 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's great if a for-profit company can survive being 100% transparent and with all code open source. So far, that'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'd argue that a core open source platform for open source developers, indeed needs to be open source and transparent.
I am myself a proponent of open source, but I don’t think it is reasonable to expect that this is going to happen.
Who contributes to open source?
To my knowledge, open source contributors can be divided into the following groups:
- People volunteering their own time.
- Companies open sourcing software they themselves developed, bought the rights to or got the rights to through aquiring another company.
- Companies contributing their bug fixes and feature additions to existing open source software. (Sometimes overlaps with previous group, sometimes not.)
- Non-profit organizations.
- People employed by educational institutions.
- Governmental institutions.
And the motivations that these groups have for contributing to open source vary wildly. Both from group to group but also within each of the groups as well.
Some of the possible motivations include:
- Believing in the ideals of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).
- Wanting to share cool stuff.
- Wanting to help others learn.
- Wanting to empower your fellow developers.
- Wanting to be empowered and in control of the software you run. Wanting freedom. Wanting to be able to run your software for any purpose and wanting to be able to modify your software in any way. Wanting to be able to run the software that you use today, tomorrow. Wanting to be in control of your data.
- Wanting to learn from others.
- Wanting to offer consulting other other paid services for people using your open source software, software that you contribute to, or software that you are skilled at using, modifying or integrating.
- Wanting the improvements that others outside of your company could bring to your software by you open sourcing it.
- Wanting to use existing, battle-tested open source software where you can instead of duplicating work and wasting hours while putting you at a competitive disadvantage compared to other businesses that make use of open source instead of needlessly reinventing the wheel.
- Wanting recognition from your peers.
And a million other motivations probably exist as well, but the ones I mentioned are the most obvious ones I can think of.
Given the list above, I think you will agree that a lot of the people involved in open source have no reason or motivation to reject the ongoing centralization.
Only if Microsoft does something with GitHub that has visibly negative effects on the specific motivations that someone has for contributing to open source will that person or group of people object.
My point is: Open source as a whole is moving in a direction counter to the one desired by some, such as yourself. For others it might not yet. And for yet others it might never. It all depends on why the person or the group of people is in open source in the first place.
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'm sure this is a welcome and long awaited feature for many devs who would love more funding around their OSS efforts.
I agree, and I'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/Microsoft develop other features in other services.
And I'm sure it was a conversation on the product team (or whoever came up with it), but eventually got dropped for for some reason.
GitHub's effectively the home of OSS development, with great UX and design aesthetics, they definitely don't need to delegate for help in building out their own product.
The only stake holders who would benefit by redirecting to external sites, are the external providers themselves as it would end up with a worse UX and fragmented and limited experience, which is exactly what you don't when wanting to attract sponsorship, it should be as easy, seamless and integrated as possible.
Use it as a loss-leader to get developer mindshare and get more people to use what they actually get a profit from, Azure and others.
Or, they can use GitHub to build a open platform for the entire ecosystem.
What of these two options are the best for users of the platform? I'm sure one option is better for the shareholders of Microsoft/GitHub, but I'm more interested in the value for the users, many who are open source developers.
Of course, they don't have to collaborate with the rest of the ecosystem. But if they were truly interested in making the open source ecosystem better, without any compromises, they would have built something different than what was launched today.
> The only stake holders who would benefit by redirecting to external sites, are the external providers themselves
Sure, if you think of it as OpenCollective vs GitHub. But in the end, open source developers are the ones who should be benefiting from whatever choice they make (that's my naive hope at least). And the choice they made was to improve short-term mindshare, in front of long-term open source sustainability.
For me, GitHub have become an essential open source infrastructure project. But, the platform itself is nowhere near open, and every new feature they seem to be launching, is closed-source and _aims_ to fracture the existing ecosystems the feature touches.
Right, that's why they paid 7.5B to acquire GitHub and are further investing in it to be more appealing to developers and gain even more mind share.
> Or, they can use GitHub to build a open platform for the entire ecosystem.
Is that code for not shipping developer focused features they've released since acquiring GitHub? Most of the features like free private repos and package repositories have been well received.
> What of these two options are the best for users of the platform?
For users, definitely all the features they're taking advantage of now that didn't exist before.
> Sure, if you think of it as OpenCollective vs GitHub.
I'm purely viewing it from the developer's perspective on what would attract more funding/sponsorship, which is by far the more convenient and integrated solution for all reasons already mentioned in my previous comments above.
I view this as a massive potential that could spur on a whole new wave of sustainable OSS development similar to what YouTube/Twitch are doing for content creators. This was never a consideration of GitHub before but with this announcement it's now become a strategic focus which I hope will be continually improved on over time.
Microsoft's takeover of GitHub is generally considered in the open source community as a negative.
After all, Microsoft's behaviour indicates a generally opposing ideology.
With regards privacy, Microsoft is up there with the worst of them (a la Facebook) with their telemetry, at the very least.
Beyond that, Microsoft has a ( perhaps rightly so) capitalist agenda which doesn't fit with open source.
In case you missed the mass exodus from GitHub on the announcement of their takeover, those that value the freedoms of Libre generally are not in favour of a Microsoft GitHub.
Giving GitHub your bank details can be reasonably synonymised with giving Microsoft your bank details and giving them a cut of the money you intended to give to a developer.
At this point, all the additions to GitHub that Microsoft are making, demonstrate how disconnected they are from that community.
Alternatives such as open collective are quite well regarded in this community and their ideology aligns like Microsoft's never will.
Worse comes to worse, you can ask a developer for a PayPal, Bitcoin or plain old bank details and just send money straight you them.
I'm not saying there are not those for whom this will be of value, but GitHub as-was is no more and ideally if some neutral party willing to host an open source, libre alternative were to show themselves, or would be more desirable than a Microsoft GitHub, for this community.
To present my anecdotal example; I don't run Windows, I don't have an Xbox, I don't have my bank details in GitHub; Microsoft is up in the top-list of companies that don't (willingly) get my bank details.
> Open source projects can also express their funding models directly from their repositories. When .github/FUNDING.yml is added to a project’s master branch, a new “Sponsor” button will appear at the top of the repository. Clicking the button opens a natively rendered view of the funding models listed in that file.
> The YAML format is flexible, so a project’s maintainers and contributors can decide how they want to fund the project on their own terms. They can showcase any (or all!) of the following: the GitHub Sponsors profiles of the developers who contribute to the project; a list of popular funding models including Open Collective, Community Bridge, Tidelift, Ko-fi, and Patreon; and custom links to alternative funding models.
From https://github.blog/2019-05-23-announcing-github-sponsors-a-....
It's great that you can now have a fancier link to OpenCollective. Thank you for that, Githubbers who are reading the HN comments. But it feels like smoke-and-mirrors.
The real announcement is the other, built-in funding platform they built. Which, if they wanted to, could have been built entirely on something open, instead of their own stuff. There is no special features that for example OpenCollective does not already have.
Instead they (not surprisingly) continue to walk down the path of closed platforms, while cheering for open source.
It improves discoverability, which is important enough that it's a big part of why people use GitHub. It might just be me, but that seems like it might benefit open source developers no matter what platform they use.
Copying from another comment I made:
> But with the new owner who sees GitHub as a way to get marketshare of developers, and not as it's own entity, it's hard to continue to cheer on them. When Microsoft have to either increase profits/decrease expenses and they choose between Azure and GitHub, I'm pretty sure the effort will either be to decrease the expenses of GitHub, or increase the profits of Azure. None of those two ways are good for the users of GitHub in the long-term.
GitHub's code has always been closed source. It's a service, not software. It's been like that since day one.
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't seem to want to go that route.
I'm a developer, I might create some tool for my needs and share it with others. I've got other income sources so there'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't care about "open development" though, I don't spend time pondering about software philosophy and its place in the world.
If there'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'd like to use, I believe author(s) made a good job, I'd like the library to be maintained, I want to pay for that with as little traction as possible. I don't care if the author created the library because he believes in "free software" or was simply bored and again, GitHub was the most convenient channel to share.
The same way I don't care what philosophy lies beneath music producer's work and what tools do we use while I'm paying him for his tutorials as long as it works for both of us.
What I'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'm scared about, because we basically have no good solutions yet, for running open source infrastructure.
Yes, we'd all love to have our tools (repository, package hosting, CIs, ...) both satisfying our needs and be free of whims of for-profit companies.
Some of us simply don't care that much as long as what we have now works and I just wanted to append that to the conversation.
That's why I only said that your message reads like... and not assumed you really believe the service is bad in overall just because it's bad within scope of one aspect that's close to your heart. :)
In the end, different people will have different priorities :)
- 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