I wonder if this is evenly distributed? $500,000 may seem like a lot but that comes out to about $500 per maintainer. This doesn't appear to be an ongoing subscription either. I personally would rather Microsoft keep the money and spend it on open sourcing their own products instead of trying to find more ways to exploit others.
Because Microsoft is incapable of doing both. They will keep taking more than they give back. I'd rather have someone keep $500 than give it to me so they can go around and brag about it and then later find out they've been using my stuff without my permission because they felt like I owed it to them.
If your work is FOSS, they don't "owe" you anything, just like you don't owe anything to them if they decide to support you. And, yes, $500k is relatively nothing for them. But I don't see how "relatively" nothing is better than actually nothing.
The context of reselling code is copilot which is of questionable legality.
They owe you a copyright header when distributing your BSD or MIT licensed code. They owe you adhering to the GPL license when distributing your GPL licensed code.
That is a separate issue, and unless they think that money would be enough to settle any license violations, it has nothing to do with donating some cash to maintainers.
That is exactly what I was referring to. I wonder if some people are just unfamiliar with copilot licensing issues or they don't see how that is an issue.
Of course the Copilot thing is problematic and they should not let be off the hook for it, but Copilot is not even referenced in the blog post.
My read is that they are giving the money to projects they use to develop GitHub itself. And if this has nothing to do with the Copilot issue, why bring it to the conversation?
Why are you contributing to open source projects if you don't want people to be able to use your contributions without your permission? You seem to be making a mistake.
I got $550 so I think it's split evenly (they state it's shared between 900 folk in the blog post, which I assume is rounded). It's a one off as you say. Even if they do this next year, this event will have prompted a lot of folk to set up sponsors, so we'd all get a smaller cut.
This is a PR stunt, but that does not mean we should not be allowed to appreciate it.
The impact is going to differ per country. For example, 550 USD might not be much for an average American programmer but for an average Ukrainian or Indian (the latter has a heart connected to) its a whole lot more. I also suppose Russian devs are out of luck.
The topic of FOSS funding is quite large and actually something where I'm surprised there's not more consulting around.
You have government grants. You have university employees. You have company employees of which Google and, indeed, Microsoft have many working solely on open source. You have open core companies (Elastic, Scylla, data bricks, ...). You have self funding and Patreon (not usually sustainable). You have funding via FOSS organizations (python, rust foundation, ...).
Does the money come with any strings attached? Are they blocking other companies from pitching in?
Your issue is with the amount they are giving, not with the fact that they giving. The way to fix this is not by saying "this is so little, just shove it", the way to fix this is by getting other companies (regardless of their size) to contribute as well.
> The topic of FOSS funding is quite large and actually something where I'm surprised there's not more consulting around.
Yes, that I completely agree. I am still puzzled at a recent conversation I had here on HN with a self-professed "tech strategy advisor for PE firms" who simply could not understand the possible benefits in looking at the services that a company depends on and in funding open source alternatives.
>Your issue is with the amount they are giving, not with the fact that they giving
No, my issues are manifold. With the slice of conversation I'm having with you, the issue I am stressing here is that a one off payment of 500 USD is not "funding" in the sense that someone can quite their job or even go to a 4 day week and shore up their finances with it. It's a one off.
You mentioned Patreon as an alternative. Do you think that the people supporting with $5/month shouldn't be considered "backers" or "funders"?
You also mentioned the FOSS Foundations, like the PSF. Where do you think that their money comes from? I have $25/month sent their way to support the JazzBand devs. Do you think that I should stop my contribution just because it is so small in the grand scheme of things?
Of course no one is going to quit their jobs over one company giving $500/year. But I'm failing to see how this is an issue. It's not like MS / Github are announcing they are going to hire all the FOSS devs from all projects they depend on. They just gave some money. Instead of looking at this and thinking "this is BS", why can't we look at this and think "Oh, nice! If even shitty companies like MS are starting to help, how can we get the better ones to do it too?"
GitLab is sure not a replacement for GitHub, it has way more limits even for public repositories, and you have to go through a complex application process for Open source projects so you can get full features.
So its either small community hosting like Codeberg.org or independent hosting, which both hurt a projects discoverability and ease to contribute.
For now, that may be true. But codeberg and forgefed are working on adding activitypub to gitea. How about we contribute to it so that we can have a fully-FOSS alternative?
Why wouldn't it be? Git itself is already decentralized, the main advantage of github is that it lets you discover/follow other projects. With activitypub, you could have people hosting their own servers (or outsourcing to someone like codeberg) and you could follow others no matter where they are.
The problem is, GitHub and Gitlab will probably not support Forgefed, Gitlab may do it if there is a PR, but GitHub won't, it kills one of their biggest features, exposure.
Also Gitea still lacks a Decent CI/CD integration/workflow, GitHub Actions and Gitlab CI/CD are much better than the Drone/Woodpecker + Gitea workflow.
If the people at Gitlab are minimally smart, they will pick it up after at least one working implementation comes. Imagine being the largest company and ignoring something that could give them not only reach parity but go beyond the incumbent in such a key feature.
I don't agree. Because of the inherit nature of git, the code repositories are distributed already so this doesn't give a fraction of the network effects that you see in other applications.
I think that the lock-in from github are in the other parts of the system: the CI, issue tracking, comment section, etc. This is what "forces" most people to have accounts there if they want to collaborate.
What I meant by exposure is the ease of finding the repo, if you run an open source project, you want people to find it, and GitHub's advantage here is massive.
Also when using an alternative hosting, people won't interact with the issues / or create PRs because they have to create yet another account.
With federation this would be solved, but the issue is that GitHub probably won't support federation.
> people won't interact with the issues / or create PRs because they have to create yet another account.
If I understood the idea of the people working on forgefed, this is not true. It's quite possible that issues/discussions and even code reviews to happen over activitypub.
> GitHub probably won't support federation
They still have an usable API, so even if they don't support it federation officially, it will be possible to implement, e.g, a bridge bot that reads/writes from your AP server to the GitHub projects that you need to interact with.
> or independent hosting, which both hurt a projects discoverability and ease to contribute
Yet it is the only real solution to not have a megacroporation control the public square for open source development. I hope that efforts to federate source forges succeed because moving to the next hosted forge with generous plans for open source developers is only a temporary solution until the owners decide that they need a return on their investment.
Same here. I'd completely forgotten that I'd even set sponsors up. At the time I was just sort of hoping for coffee money now and then. That never happened of course. Most of the stuff I write is a bit too niche. I got the email about $550 on Friday after work and it was a nice way to wrap up the week!
Yeah I also received the donation, my first thought was "wow, thanks!". After that I'm actually really curious, which of my repositories was responsible?
I guess I have a bunch of repos with lots of stars, but equally very few actual real users. But nothing that seems significantly "special" enough to make me a top user, and nothing that I'd expect github themselves are using, even indirectly.
Weird. But nice.
I've been signed up for sponsors for a year or so, because people keep saying it's a good thing. In all that time I had one guy sponsor me for a few months, then stop. A nice experience, but at the same time I guess you have to be extremely lucky, prolific, or shamefully promoting yourself to actual get enough income to live on.
- On the one hand, for GitHub, 500k is nothing, just a PR move. For maintainers, $500 might make the difference between struggling to pay rent and having enough money to leave it in the bank, or having a nice dinner at the end of the month.
- On the other hand, for GitHub, 500k is nothing, just a PR move! If they really wanted to show appreciation for the maintainers that power a billion dollar business, more than a drop in the bucket would be great.
So, I guess it boils down to: that’s a great start, don’t stop there!
i would bet good money that GitHub controls a non-profit whose purpose is to give money to open source devs. Otherwise every donation to a sponsor would be a loss because they're passing on 100% of the money†. If, however, they're giving the money to a non-profit then it's all a tax write-off for them.
† yeah, yeah, soon they'll be charging 10% to companies who sponsor, but I'm betting us little folks donating are cumulatively at least a million dollars and they probably don't want to loose hundred thousand when they could have a tax credit for it.
I think companies or individuals contributing money to projects they rely on is great, and I personally do it and incentivize OSS development in my own consulting practice (through lower fees and philanthropy).
Now, should it be the main source of income for an OSS project, especially when it’s “critical infrastructure” (let’s just pretend that term is well defined and means whatever it means to each of us)? Probably not, and there should probably be a better way.
Whether science funding in particular is a good model I would debate, since it can be such a beauty pageant at times.
I am not, but what I know is, it involves lots of buerocracy and still lets lots of science unfunded. But this is understandable, as science is unlimited and the question remains, who decides what is worth funding? And remember that funding is tax payer money.
Thing is, had GitHub done nothing, there's no discussion at all right now on HN about how little they're doing.
But because they put $500k toward those people whose projects they rely upon, there is now a discussion of what a pittance it is (whether or not you append "good job, hopefully you do more in the future" doesn't change the critical tone you set with all your other words you said before you said that).
The lesson: Almost no act of generosity goes without criticism on social media or discussion sites.
(Note: I hold a pragmatic view of generosity. I don't care what a person or company's motivations are for being generous. PR? Great! Let's show it makes for great PR to be generous! Selfishness, bolstering one's sense of grandeur? Great, feel whatever you want about yourself, as others benefited! Trying to out-compete a rival or friend by giving more than they? Great competition to be in! Did GitHub give to one person? Great! Did they give to 900 people? Great! Did they give each person $10? Great! Did they give each person $550? Great!)
A $500K donation to the maintainers of the open source projects used by a company is significant. Full stop. There is no other hand. It is also not the only contributions they make. If all companies made decent sized donations to the open source projects they rely upon the whole ecosystem would be more vibrant and sustainable.
Microsoft also has its FOSS Fund which donates $10K each month to a project that is nominated and voted upon by its FOSS contributors. https://github.com/microsoft/foss-fund
Is there even one $10M ARR business that has donated $500K even one time? Maybe I am just missing this as these companies do not get the attention of GitHub but I have been involved in open source for 20+ years now and I have little memory of any companies that are donating. The only contributions I tend to see is the companies that have FTE to work on some of the open source projects that matter to that company.
What about all of the banks, oil, retail etc. with enormous ARR? Every company relies on open source. Most do not contribute money or people to the effort. We ought to be celebrating and encouraging more of this.
> Is there even one $10M ARR business that has donated $500K even one time?
I don’t have exact figures for most of these companies, of course, but I have seen many small consulting or teaching businesses contribute a lot of money to OSS (here’s one such example, I don’t know the company, just a quick look on Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/frontendmasters). That’s because they rely on the success of those software systems to continue making money, of course, but I don’t think that’s any less true for the big payers.
> What about all of the banks, oil, retail etc. with enormous ARR?
I in no way meant to single out GitHub or insinuate that what they were doing was bad, that’s why I tried to end on a high note (to emphasize yet again: _it’s a great start_). What I’m trying to say is that I hope it doesn’t stop there, for GitHub or anyone else. The incentive to do it is higher when there’s good PR coming out of it, and that is mostly true the first time around. I’m hoping that there are more incentives at play than just PR (genuinely, not in a “but I don’t think so” way).
The term originates from the concept of receiving a free horse and having the audacity to check its teeth so as to judge the quality and value of the gift as that was the means at the time of judging a horse's age, longevity and health.
$500k donated by any business is a lot and should be praised and encourage others. They don't HAVE to do anything, but they are taking the initiative to help out. Can't say the same about other companies.
It seems like you are pretty angry at me trying to get the notion across that this is good, but they could do better. That’s okay, I can deal with that.
But I want to make one thing clear: I’m not doing this for HN karma. I haven’t commented on here in years, and this article prompted a reaction. Trying to somehow shoehorn that into "you’re only doing this for points” is invalidating that in a way that I find troubling, because, really, how can I prove you wrong? I might just have an opinion on something and wanted to engage with a community about it, or I might not. Only I can tell (and you, apparently).
EDIT: Correction. I submitted two comments 2 months ago that I forgot about, the comments before that are from 2019.
It might be a little glib, but that’s the main incentive I see here, especially since they’re exclusively using their own system, Github Sponsors, to direct the money. It makes sense, but if it was truly only about the maintainers, wouldn’t it be better to get the money to them through whatever means they choose to implement?
But you’re right: in the end trying to find out what their actual motives are is purely speculation, and I shouldn’t have phrased it as if it were a fact.
If $500K is such great PR that it's worth it to the company, I hope we can see a bunch of other companies (and, hey, divisions of Microsoft) do it too!
Presumably people are just as or even more upset at all the other companies who use open source internally but don't give cash like this to large numbers of open source projects? Right? [insert Anakin Padme meme] If all big companies donated $500K a year to open source, that'd be a pretty significant change in the environment, wouldn't it?
I have noticed for a while that HN comments lean really anti-Github. I don't really understand why.
> If all big companies donated $500K a year to open source, that'd be a pretty significant change in the environment, wouldn't it?
If those other companies stood to gain as much for $500K spent on marketing, they'd be doing it too.
GitHub isn't somehow more benevolent than all the others. I happen to like GitHub for the product it provides. I just find corporate marketing using maintainers as a proxy is lame. But good for the people who received the money, however.
The question is, how many other companies do that? Would be great if more companies could go through their used libraries and spend $500k. Github doesn't have to make up for all the other users not paying.
No good deed goes unpunished. They didn’t have to do this, and now that they did, not surprisingly people (who probably aren’t even the recipients) are complaining that the amount is too tiny, the donation isn’t ongoing, etc.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the complainers’ employers paid a tiny, one time $550 to open source projects they depend on.
I usually don't consider something to be a good deed if more money is spent promoting the deed than cost of the deed. That's kind of my threshold.
I often see that a corporation spends e.g. $1M on a marketing blitz about a $50,000 donation, or runs some campaign where consumers need to do something for some very nominal donation somewhere.
The cynic in me also looks at this as a bribe. Someone who got a $500 gift is much more likely to stay on github. Do that for the top 1000 projects, and you've stemmed the flow to gitlab.
The cynic in me became a lot more cynical when github started selling my own code back to me with copilot.
To companies using my open source projects: please donate $550 then go on a $1m marketing blitz telling everyone about it. I don’t care how you spend your money outside your donation.
Now, this is a pseudonymous account so you obviously don’t know whether you use my projects. Just donate to whatever you use.
To expand: I see grandstanding all the time. I see precious little money flowing into my PayPal tip jar. Casual users of my completely free web services have been a lot more generous than companies/developers using my open source libraries/tools. I’m completely fine with the lack of donations, but that certainly makes all the grandstanding from stingy people who don’t give a dime very annoying.
There’s no way to know for sure. And there must be outliers. But
1. From my observation, donors tend to appreciate other donors a bit more.
2. I’ve confronted a few of these people in the past. When asked how much they donated, the answer was always I don’t donate because excuses X, Y, Z. But rich companies/people must donate more; they’re all PR stunts; blah blah.
2. I only work on open source. My income is at most half of what it would be if I worked on proprietary software. I do donate to other projects, and I do appreciate (serious) donors. I've never gotten (or asked for) tips, but I've gotten one or two donations big enough to make a difference.
3. I would also encourage you to read about how con artists (and marketers) manipulate people by generate reciprocity:
- Someone on the street hands you a "free" pamphlet / flower / etc. and asks for a donation.
- Thought leaders are sent a free product
- Managers / executives are wined and dined just below what conflict-of-interest laws allow
... and so on.
I don't appreciate being manipulated. I have turned down gifts and donations before which felt in bad faith.
I might be wrong, and from the number of comments, perhaps I am wrong.
However, my experience is that cost structures at FAANG, Microsoft, etc. are astronomical. In abstract, if the CEO decides to donate $500k and make a blog post, things can sometimes be relatively fast and easy.
In practice, usually one person spends a few weeks or months working to make a case for it, which bounces around the reporting channels, approvals, etc. Communication about it is approved through legal and marketing. Legal brings up issues about what to do if a maintainer is in Cuba and subject to Cuban embargoes, China and subject to Chinese taxes, or the Talysh-Mughan Autonomous Republic.
Median compensation is around $350k (and total cost close to double that). Basically anything external-facing like this usually ends up costing a lot by small business standards. $500k is 0.0003% of Microsoft's annual revenues, or on the order of magnitude of the annual cost of 1 employee (or 0.0006% of the organization). At a trillion-dollar scale, it kinda makes sense to have process. A mistake can wipe out single-digit percent of stock value overnight.
My experience, also, is that the process doesn't improve quality. It just prevents stupid shit from going out.
It's not punishment. I think everybody here would reply in the same way if someone asked a week ago "what if GitHub donated $500 to top-1000 OSS projects?"
People complain about how little it is, and generate negative PR for the donation.
For a company, negative PR is a punishment.
What's the lesson here? At least the lesson some in the HN community are teaching is that if you are a big company and you donate to open source projects, you will generate negative PR for yourself.
(We can assume and/or question their motivations, but to me, motivations are almost always irrelevant to an act of generosity. Feel good about yourself if you help others out! Garner positive PR if you help others out as a company! Why should positive things for the giver detract from an act of generosity? Got a problem with the system? That's a problem with the system, not the person or company being generous.)
Look I'm not trying to defend "fartcannon" per se, but I gotta point out that if there's any bitterness here it's due to Microsoft's past actions. People who are suspicious of MS have good reasons.
I'm sure if some other company donated $0.5M to FOSS maintainers the negativity would be greatly muted or even absent.
Microsoft uses these platforms to advertise/promote. I don't like it. Advertising and PR are pollution. If Coca-Cola PR or big oil or the tobacco industry promoted on this website, I'd have a similar distaste for it.
Cheers. Your rhetorical style is a little rough perhaps, but you're not wrong.
When you compared the payments to "blood money" I was like "Oh my", but then I recalled an article that points out that Bill Gates knew Epstein "decades prior to 2011" ( https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/05/investigative-reports/t... ) and I throw up my hands (and my breakfast.) What a world we live in, eh?
Because anyone with any insight into human nature can see this would happen.
You're a traveller in a lesser economically developed country. You're in the wilderness, you haven't seen anyone in a while. You see a stranger, who sees you're travelling alone and invites you to a meal, eager to share a part of their life with you.
Now this is how GitHub is acting:
At the end, you reach into your pocket for a note of the local currency, the stranger shakes his head.
You continue taking out a nominal amount.
"No", the stranger says in his language. You insist, putting the note into his hand. The stranger looks offended. You smile, oblivious.
"THANK YOU VERY MUCH!" You repeat and kill the stranger's act of altruism.
Because I doubt many would. I think reaction would be "Sure, this is nice I guess."
But I don't think it is anything more than marketing on the side of GitHub. And I think what annoys people is when people seem to think it is more than that.
The expectation that people cannot criticize MSFT after doing this is exactly why people are suspicious of donations like this so if anything you are validating the "punishment" that you are complaining about.
Yea honestly github is just one user, and paying probably more than their own fair share for usage of all these open source libraries. It’s ridiculous that some people even suggest somehow github is responsible for maintaining the livelihoods of all these developers. Maybe follow github’s lead and all the people complaining made donations as well.
> From the U.S. to Japan to Brazil, if you’re one of the people or projects we identified
> then you will get a confirmation about the sponsorship before the end of June.
How will this work for the Japanese? I've tried donating to Anki, maintained by someone in Japan, and it seems that accepting donations there is so problematic that he actually prefers just not to accept them.
Wondering how they are counting dependencies. GitHub’s current dependency tooling (Dependabit, Dependency Graph) ignores Dockerfiles for eg, and anything installed on the OS level is not easily accounted either.
Something about that headline really irks me. I think GitHub is an amazing place for people to share code, I also think it’s really nice of them to do this.
But the maintainers aren’t “their” maintainers. They are maintainers using GitHub for their projects.
Probably just me overreacting, just thought I’d mention it.
They're referring to maintainers of projects that GitHub relies on for their own work, so calling them "our maintainers" isn't much of a linguistic stretch.
I think the one-off donation to be completely tin-eared. They should offer to pay a salary to developers working on critical infrastructure, Jetbrains effectively did this with Nikita Popov, or leave open source alone.
GitHub has shown they are naive regarding psychology around this area.
Offering rewards in advance is not the same psychologically as receiving surprise rewards because of work already done.
Also while I'm familiar with the debate around incentives for blood donations that particular paper you have cited is terrible.
Notably they do a literature review where they find discussions about how it could theoretically undermine motivations, but don't address the counter-argument they mention themselves where they list example of rewards being used to successfully increase supply! They list studies where it both decreased and increased supply, which seems to indicate that the type of incentive and the conditions in which it was offered make a significant difference.
They end up arguing that there are risks that incentivized donors come from groups of higher risk of infectious blood diseases. This may or may not true, but is a different argument to if incentives work.
Yes, the timing of this really makes me think that it could be to divert attention from the negative press that copilot got.
Having people talk about whether 500k is the right amount to donate for a gigantic company like Microsoft is much better than people discussing the ethics, legality, trustworthiness and pricing of copilot.
Last week we talked about whether or not it is legal to use license x to train their AI or if they will secretly steal our proprietary code and accidentally leak it for everyone else to see. Today we talk about whether the nice gesture for maintainers are enough.
Yes and if I were to guess a lot of folks who are upset about copilot stealing and selling code don't have GitHub sponsors enabled so it feels not genuine. It reads more like "here's a friendly reminder that you can make money with open source as long as you enable GitHub sponsors which btw will make us money too[0]!".
[0]: Organizations will have at least a 10% fee taken from GitHub once the beta is finished. There's also no guarantee that personal accounts will remain fee-less too, this could easily be "just another" spot where a company offers something for free for mass adoption and then charges for it later. In any case it's marketing for a feature that provides revenue to GitHub.
Hmmm... I never finished updating my Github Sponsor thing, so I've just done that.
But as someone that tended to create orgs for projects rather than have it all under a personal account, should I move all of the projects? I guess so, right?
What's the recommended way to move Go repos without breaking them for all users? (I have low-thousands of stars, but the largest project is used by mid-thousands of projects - so I anticipate breakage for my hopeful $5 one-off solo sponsor).
I'm not entirely sure, but I think if your personal account is marked as a maintainer for the repo, it doesn't matter if the repo is under its own org? I feel like most projects create org accounts, so would be kinda surprised if that wasn't supported somehow.
Hmm I'm not sure I understand. Here's what I'm assuming:
You currently have some number of org repos; eg: my-project/my-project, foobar/foobar
And you have your personal account: buro9.
You use your personal account to commit and maintain those org repos.
As long as you set your personal account as an admin/maintainer on those org repos, I think you get all the benefits you need? I don't think there's any benefit to moving eg my-project/my-project to buro9/my-project
The .github/FUNDING.yml file in the repo determines who will be shown as people to sponsor, it's not related to the account or org that controls the repo.
I'd love to be able to filter by language. My main work is not JS and my JS dependencies are kind of incidental to it, but JS repos dominate the listing for me, I guess just by how JS is so dependency prolific.
I'm really disappointed with the conversation this has provoked. I was a fortunate recipient of this and I am delighted. I'm pleased about the money, that's great. But more than that I was really thrilled to discover that I had indirectly worked on GitHub; because I love GitHub.
I feel like I should qualify this further. I actually missed the original email and spent a day or so realising friends and open source colleagues were being recognised, whilst believing my own OSS wasn't in the mix. And I was pleased for them.
I've been doing OSS for more than a decade. I enjoy it. I wish companies directly supported it, as paying for what you value is responsible and wise. GitHub just did that. Thank you GitHub. I appreciate it. This was a good thing. Well done!
This is quite problematic area indeed.
If developers are happy for receiving 500$ for decades of their work, what justifies paying more in the future?
I guess everything is good and there is no need to change anything.
I get it, that it is the idea of open source, but the demands are increasing towards authors while they just use their spare time in most of the cases.
More of their work is used to generate money, but authors are receiving barely anything.
> There's a Radiohead lab episode about money the gov gives the families of the people it kills.
Hey fartcannon, I think you're saying that GitHub surprising open source developers with cash gifts is analogous to governments compensating families for killing relatives. My only thought on this is: I hope that you're okay, and if you need help I hope you'll seek it. It's been a tough few years.
> I hope that you're okay, and if you need help I hope you'll seek it.
This is really a disgusting way to try to demean the person you are talking to that is all too common. Instead of making thinly veiled attacks on the integrity of other commenters try responding to their arguments.
My comment was sincere, but if you haven't read the parent's other comments in the thread I can understand how it might seem callous. FWIW, I appreciate you calling me out just as I called the parent out — I can always do better.
I have great empathy for the parent because I've also ascribed disproportionate malice to benign corporate behavior, and at that time it was helpful for me to be asked, "Hey, do you have other stuff going on that you might need to deal with?". I've also been on the other side of it, receiving death threats on behalf of a multinational corporation because of meaningless marketing or technical decisions. Both are shitty places to be.
You seem like a cool guy so I'm gonna answer you. If that is true, and if you could figure out how to teach it, you should, because it would literally save the world.
Thanks for the compliment, but I still don't see how this relates to your first point. Do you believe that the same people that are (justly) upset at the Copilot debacle are going to forget the issue because of a PR move?
Moreover, why would be so hard for people to separate judgement between specific issues and the company as a whole? As in, Microsoft is still a corporation that is not going to get my sympathy, but we can still acknowledge that giving some money to FOSS developers is better than not giving anything.
The directly affected people (people who have spent a significant portion of their working lives building open source software) won't forget.
The general developer population (people who use but don't necessarily contribute to open source) sees a payment in support of open source and moves on. It's a PR campaign aimed at copilot users who aren't directly affected but found the whole episode discomforting.
> The general developer population (people who use but don't necessarily contribute to open source) sees a payment in support of open source and moves on.
That cuts both ways. One could just as easily make the case that this PR move can lead to other companies interested in supporting FOSS.
My point is: instead of judging the merit of "they are doing this for PR", why don't you judge the merit of the action, and simply ignore the meta-opinion about how they are spinning the story?
If this were part of an effort that started last year, or if GitHub had a serious history in donating to maintainers of open source software (either in the 10 years as a private company or 4 years as part of Microsoft), then this would be judged on the merits of donating to open source.
But they don't have that sort of history, so "why are they starting now as opposed to years ago?" is a natural question to ask.
You can (and should) ask as many meta-questions as you want. But what I am seeing is that people are trying to judge the main topic based on these meta-questions, and that is... I don't know, kind of stupid?
Again: you are fully entitled to like or dislike Microsoft. But if you hear "BigCorp gave $500k to FOSS" and your opinion of this depends on "which BigCorp did it?", I'll take it as a sign that your opinion is biased and should be completely ignored.
VS Code is literally Microsoft's own product, which they wrote in-house and subsequently open-sourced. I'm having a very hard time imagining how "EEE" could apply here.
Well let me help! First you embrace open source with vscode to get mindshare, then you extend with closed source plugins, and finally extinguish competition who can't use those plugins!
Github is Microsoft. Microsoft has called your work cancer and spent several decades trying to undermine and destroy it. Doesn't it bother you that days after they start directly profiting off your work through copilot that they attempt to buy some positive PR?
If Microsoft didn't fight FOSS so aggressively, perhaps the world would support it more. Instead, Microsoft alone will profit, and they tossed a couple people a one time tiny sum.
So yes, well done Github, you've further divided a community.
This wasn't done to divide the community. This was done as a simple thank you and as Microsoft treats GitHub as a separate business entity, Microsoft almost certainly wasn't involved in this decision. 500k is small enough that this may not have even risen to a VP level for approval.
Change happens slowly. This is a small step in the right direction.
I lost respect for a lot of you today who had the nerve to suggest that these amounts aren't enough money. For the OSS contributions I've made, I've never been given a penny or even so much as a single coffee for the things I've created, but if someone did, it could be a nickel and I'm not going to say anything but thank you. Nobody owes you anything in this world, and a little grace goes a long way in this industry.
For those of you who complained about the money, you people need to reflect on your attitudes and what brought you to this point.
First of all: Everyone should have enough money to live a life in dignity.
However, this is about public open source projects. You can earn money with those projects. But then you also have to clearly communicate this. Either by asking for donations, sponsorship or offer a support contract. Because the default model of open source is: Here is some code, here is the license, feel free to use it without going through a paywall first.
Your parent didn't call anyone a name, but described as "ugly" the actions of the people who impugn GitHub/MS for this act that benefits open source maintainers--and surely seeks positive PR for GitHub/MS as well.
(Meanwhile, you solely mention the PR aspect of this act, as if there is no other benefit in the equation. There are two general entities that will benefit from this, although some here seem to prefer no benefit whatsoever befall GitHub/MS and even want to turn this into negative PR. Anyway, assuming it does turn out to be net-positive PR for GitHub/MS, then 900 devs as well as GitHub/MS will benefit from this act.)
Maybe your parent commenter made it too personal by bringing respect into the discussion. I just didn't feel your parent poster called anyone a name, so I disagree with what you're saying was being done there. That commenter named an action as being ugly, which is not problematic, IMHO.
I don't think it's the same thing as calling names; it's an important distinction to me to criticize actions and not people, and that's what your parent did.
Many here are criticizing the actions of GitHub/MS. That's fair, but we can also criticize the act of criticizing just the same.
(Again, I might agree with you if bringing "respect" into it could be seen as having a similar effect as name-calling in the sense that it makes the discussion more personal than it needs to be.)
Time isn't free and the number of "issues" that many projects have to deal with due to entitlement derangement syndrome makes a maintainer's life miserable.
This is why most high volume OS maintainers are either employed by companies just to maintain the code or they are younger with less life commitments.
I do open source, and I do charge for it. I make a bit less than I would on proprietary, but plenty to live off of.
Any technical project requires focus, and if I paid the bills with something else, I wouldn't have time and space to focus.
I've never been particularly successful with side projects until they became full-time projects. I don't know many other people who have. Side projects are great for exploring, but when one gains traction, to be successful, I've always needed to find a way to focus on it full-time (which means using it to pay the bills).
I couldn't lose any more respect: I have almost none for people who devalue my labor the way these people do. To see them then complain when one of the corporations they give their labor to for free offers them a pittance in return is just amusing. Maybe they should negotiate a salary and stop working for free.
No one is devaluing your "labor". Perhaps you are devaluing yourself because you think that software development (and especially open source) is about "labor".
There's a decent point you're making that's getting lost because you're choosing to use the inflammatory language. Delete your first sentence, and the last two sentences, and the same point is there and more likely to be taken.
Just as a note that when the parent comment was posted, the comment section looked very different. It was almost all vitriol. It was genuinely discouraging and disheartening to read, and ugly was the correct adjective. I really resonated seeing this comment, and was pleased to then see it and similar comments basically within minutes jump to the very top. Ie suggesting that others resonated with it as well. The comments being made now are significantly lower temperature, and I think this comment is partly responsible for that de-escalation. Although I do agree that absent that context it comes off as inflammatory--it's a shame that there's no way to see that context in online comment threads like HN!
With all due respect, I feel there is a time and place for some emotion to come through. The tone policing and courtesy concern isn’t well warranted here, even if well intentioned.
Your comment reminds me of the dating book “He’s just not that into you”: there’s no complex reason why your OSS contributions have’t made a penny. If you aren’t able to make money off them, it’s because they’re worth zero dollars. Making money starts with not giving away ones work for free.
And I disagree that it’s the complainers that need to self-reflect. If I had received $500 even in the times I was making the equivalent of ~300EUR per month from such huge assholes like MS, I would honestly have been very conflicted about accepting the money in the first place and in no way would have jumped to their defense.
Open-Source was always and forever will be an act of charity. Volunteering. Something born of good will for the common good. I feel there was a rush for gold and power with the rise of the iPhone appification and the Social Network rockstarification of the software world.
Thank you for writing exactly as you did, it’s frustrating for the “old timers” coming from the hacker culture of yore to grapple with the money grubbers.
I don't think this really represents the full spectrum of beliefs for why people open-source their work. Some of us just fundamentally disagree with the copyright system in general and OS or public domain is more of a "non-participation"
If someone wants to put their work in the public domain and only leave a note in their README that they don't want this to be used for profit and then complain when a company uses it a way they don't like then I 100% agree and support them.
This is the problem with laws and rules. They tend to replace independent moral thought. Instead of asking whether it was right or wrong for that company to use it without the consent of the author, we all get stuck on "well, technically". There's a difference between legal rights and morals.
tl;dr: Some people choose not to participate in the copyright system simply because they wanna push back against us offshoring our abilities to think critically about morals to regulatory bodies. Open source isn't "an act of charity". It's a lot of things to a lot of people
Yeah but that's missing the point imo. The ideological battle is about what is the "default" here. Our legal system has overtaken the commons and now to do something that would have at one point been the assumed default of human cultural products is now something you have to explicitly state. And even then it's just giving you sort of a platform to fight off of within the very legal system that took this away in the first place
> Open-Source was always and forever will be an act of charity. Volunteering.
Many high-profile Free and Open Source software projects are developed mainly by paid employees. Some examples: the Linux kernel, OpenJDK, Firefox, and Chromium.
I got the email on Friday telling me I'm one of the fortunate few to get $550 and cynically thought that it was some sort of GitHub credit; needless to say that I was pleasantly surprised that it was actual cash!
I've been solo maintaining my project since 2008 and average about ~425,000 downloads/week per NPM. My sum total of donations prior to GitHub's was maybe $5. Making money on a JavaScript library was certainly never my goal but I sincerely appreciate the acknowledgement that my project has worth that someone is willing to pay for.
It's a niche project (even more so when I started it to salt/hash passwords client side during the expensive SSL days) so it's almost never worth advertising :)
same! I maintain a humble little lib used by prettier, etc and it receives 5.5 million weekly downloads. I've got a few more like that as well. They've never received a donation, and I have just a few monthly donors (to which I'm very grateful) so this was cool to see.
Why? They donated to projects that GitHub's code depends on. The person who brings me my mail is accurately referred to as "my mail person". Not because I somehow own them, but because they're the person who provides service to my home.
Would you feel the same way if they'd said "We're adding new features for our users"?
I think it’s because they are the maintainers of their projects, not maintainers of GitHub. So calling them GitHub’s maintainers sounds off, even if GitHub depends on their projects. It’s a weird application of the transitive property.
I suspect the maintainers would definitely say they are a user of GitHub. Most would not say they are a maintainer of GitHub (at least I don’t think so).
They are both "maintainers who use GitHub's platform" and "maintainers of software GitHub depends on". "Our maintainers" is just as normal as "Our neighbor" or "Our users".
To pick the most adverse example: GitHub could equally talk about Gitlab and say "Our competitor". They're clearly not saying Gitlab belongs to them or giving them some kind of connection that doesn't exist.
Still sounds strange to me though I can understand your point. “One of our competitors” to me sounds the same as “one of our users”, and different from “one of our maintainers” when referring to someone who is not a maintainer of GitHub.
It’s sounds more (to me) like calling someone else’s kids one of your children because they are visiting your house.
Anyway, I can only imagine how uninteresting this conversation must be to anyone else :)
It changes different settings in the font. In GitHub's case, they use the font "Alliance No.1". ss02 doesn't appear to have a visible effect, but ss01 changes the letter a from a rounded body with a stem on top to a rounded body with a straight stem on the right. You may have custom fonts disabled—these feature settings do the right thing on GitHub's and ProtonMail's ("Arizona") fonts, but make your system fonts do weird things. Both sites appear just fine for me on Firefox on Linux.
On the one hand, hooray for half a million dollars for the hardworking folks "down in the trenches" who seldom receive the appreciation or remuneration they so richly deserve. Hoorah!
On the other hand, this does nothing for me as a Free software fanatic to make Github and Microsoft any more palatable. I still can't believe that a closed, proprietary centralized webapp has so completely co-opted both the git DCVS and FOSS itself. (I've heard people unironically call Github the "flagship of the FOSS movement".)
The image I get is of the boss riding by in a gilded carriage casting handfuls of gold coins to the serfs.
Some of the comments here are of the "shut up and be grateful" ilk, and some even try to shame people for not being sufficiently grateful and/or uncritical. I call BS on that.
If Github/MS find themselves in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation in re: supporting FOSS maintainers it's only because of their own actions and history.
If they really wanted to thank FOSS folks they could open source Github, eh? Or Windows.
Did anyone get $500 that didn't signup for GitHub's payment process or putting their non-standard `.github/` folder in your repository? This feels like a FOMO play to get more users to add GitHub mirrors to their project to try to dominate the Code forge space and tangential donations (which is why they did a loss-leading match program in the beta). I'd rather not prop that up; I'll stick to Sourcehut and Codeberg/Gitea.
Tangential: you don’t have to put a .github folder in every repository. You can create a .github repository and put files like FUNDING.yml in there, and they will take effect across all of your repos.
I think it's pretty pathetic some of you are focused on copilot (as if youve never ripped code off SO before). I'm willing to bet none of you have contributed anything to open source either. Dunning-Kruger effect on full display.
To the rest, congratulations and thank you from those of us who thanklessly use your hard work. I hope this kind of public appreciation takes off and we see more large names using this as a template.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] threadThey owe you a copyright header when distributing your BSD or MIT licensed code. They owe you adhering to the GPL license when distributing your GPL licensed code.
My read is that they are giving the money to projects they use to develop GitHub itself. And if this has nothing to do with the Copilot issue, why bring it to the conversation?
They should probably be paying more, not less.
How much did Bainbridge Health give to open source health platforms? Hopefully at least .001% of those amounts.
Shh, you're not supposed to explain the trick.
Not life changing but certainly always a nice way to start the day, with some unexpected $$.
The impact is going to differ per country. For example, 550 USD might not be much for an average American programmer but for an average Ukrainian or Indian (the latter has a heart connected to) its a whole lot more. I also suppose Russian devs are out of luck.
I mean, of course MS is not donating out of pure altruism. But so what?
The topic of FOSS funding is quite large and actually something where I'm surprised there's not more consulting around.
You have government grants. You have university employees. You have company employees of which Google and, indeed, Microsoft have many working solely on open source. You have open core companies (Elastic, Scylla, data bricks, ...). You have self funding and Patreon (not usually sustainable). You have funding via FOSS organizations (python, rust foundation, ...).
Did you not know about all these?
Does the money come with any strings attached? Are they blocking other companies from pitching in?
Your issue is with the amount they are giving, not with the fact that they giving. The way to fix this is not by saying "this is so little, just shove it", the way to fix this is by getting other companies (regardless of their size) to contribute as well.
> The topic of FOSS funding is quite large and actually something where I'm surprised there's not more consulting around.
Yes, that I completely agree. I am still puzzled at a recent conversation I had here on HN with a self-professed "tech strategy advisor for PE firms" who simply could not understand the possible benefits in looking at the services that a company depends on and in funding open source alternatives.
No, my issues are manifold. With the slice of conversation I'm having with you, the issue I am stressing here is that a one off payment of 500 USD is not "funding" in the sense that someone can quite their job or even go to a 4 day week and shore up their finances with it. It's a one off.
You also mentioned the FOSS Foundations, like the PSF. Where do you think that their money comes from? I have $25/month sent their way to support the JazzBand devs. Do you think that I should stop my contribution just because it is so small in the grand scheme of things?
Of course no one is going to quit their jobs over one company giving $500/year. But I'm failing to see how this is an issue. It's not like MS / Github are announcing they are going to hire all the FOSS devs from all projects they depend on. They just gave some money. Instead of looking at this and thinking "this is BS", why can't we look at this and think "Oh, nice! If even shitty companies like MS are starting to help, how can we get the better ones to do it too?"
So its either small community hosting like Codeberg.org or independent hosting, which both hurt a projects discoverability and ease to contribute.
Is ActivityPub / decentralization viable for git though?
Also Gitea still lacks a Decent CI/CD integration/workflow, GitHub Actions and Gitlab CI/CD are much better than the Drone/Woodpecker + Gitea workflow.
It's not a popularity contest.
I think that the lock-in from github are in the other parts of the system: the CI, issue tracking, comment section, etc. This is what "forces" most people to have accounts there if they want to collaborate.
With federation this would be solved, but the issue is that GitHub probably won't support federation.
If I understood the idea of the people working on forgefed, this is not true. It's quite possible that issues/discussions and even code reviews to happen over activitypub.
> GitHub probably won't support federation
They still have an usable API, so even if they don't support it federation officially, it will be possible to implement, e.g, a bridge bot that reads/writes from your AP server to the GitHub projects that you need to interact with.
https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/join/
You're joking right? If this is complex then I guess you've never signed a CLA for apache or any other project?
Also you don't have to email anyone to renew anything(2) And the project can seek profit too, so compared to GitHub, its a hassel.
1. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati...
2.https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati...
Yet it is the only real solution to not have a megacroporation control the public square for open source development. I hope that efforts to federate source forges succeed because moving to the next hosted forge with generous plans for open source developers is only a temporary solution until the owners decide that they need a return on their investment.
I guess I have a bunch of repos with lots of stars, but equally very few actual real users. But nothing that seems significantly "special" enough to make me a top user, and nothing that I'd expect github themselves are using, even indirectly.
Weird. But nice.
I've been signed up for sponsors for a year or so, because people keep saying it's a good thing. In all that time I had one guy sponsor me for a few months, then stop. A nice experience, but at the same time I guess you have to be extremely lucky, prolific, or shamefully promoting yourself to actual get enough income to live on.
I expect that user facing programs are more likely to succeed than libraries.
- On the one hand, for GitHub, 500k is nothing, just a PR move. For maintainers, $500 might make the difference between struggling to pay rent and having enough money to leave it in the bank, or having a nice dinner at the end of the month.
- On the other hand, for GitHub, 500k is nothing, just a PR move! If they really wanted to show appreciation for the maintainers that power a billion dollar business, more than a drop in the bucket would be great.
So, I guess it boils down to: that’s a great start, don’t stop there!
Which is nice for the recipients of course, but otherwise is what it is.
† yeah, yeah, soon they'll be charging 10% to companies who sponsor, but I'm betting us little folks donating are cumulatively at least a million dollars and they probably don't want to loose hundred thousand when they could have a tax credit for it.
You don't pay taxes on revenue, you pay it on profit. If they pay out all the revenue they owe taxes on $0
Not saying that science funding is perfect.
Now, should it be the main source of income for an OSS project, especially when it’s “critical infrastructure” (let’s just pretend that term is well defined and means whatever it means to each of us)? Probably not, and there should probably be a better way.
Whether science funding in particular is a good model I would debate, since it can be such a beauty pageant at times.
I am not, but what I know is, it involves lots of buerocracy and still lets lots of science unfunded. But this is understandable, as science is unlimited and the question remains, who decides what is worth funding? And remember that funding is tax payer money.
No. $0 is nothing. $500k is $500k.
But if you think both are the same, then surely you think they should have just done nothing since it's equivalent?
But because they put $500k toward those people whose projects they rely upon, there is now a discussion of what a pittance it is (whether or not you append "good job, hopefully you do more in the future" doesn't change the critical tone you set with all your other words you said before you said that).
The lesson: Almost no act of generosity goes without criticism on social media or discussion sites.
(Note: I hold a pragmatic view of generosity. I don't care what a person or company's motivations are for being generous. PR? Great! Let's show it makes for great PR to be generous! Selfishness, bolstering one's sense of grandeur? Great, feel whatever you want about yourself, as others benefited! Trying to out-compete a rival or friend by giving more than they? Great competition to be in! Did GitHub give to one person? Great! Did they give to 900 people? Great! Did they give each person $10? Great! Did they give each person $550? Great!)
Microsoft also has its FOSS Fund which donates $10K each month to a project that is nominated and voted upon by its FOSS contributors. https://github.com/microsoft/foss-fund
Both are valid opinions, I think, but personally I tend to be more impressed by the smaller business.
At any rate, as I said, it’s a great start.
What about all of the banks, oil, retail etc. with enormous ARR? Every company relies on open source. Most do not contribute money or people to the effort. We ought to be celebrating and encouraging more of this.
I don’t have exact figures for most of these companies, of course, but I have seen many small consulting or teaching businesses contribute a lot of money to OSS (here’s one such example, I don’t know the company, just a quick look on Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/frontendmasters). That’s because they rely on the success of those software systems to continue making money, of course, but I don’t think that’s any less true for the big payers.
> What about all of the banks, oil, retail etc. with enormous ARR?
I in no way meant to single out GitHub or insinuate that what they were doing was bad, that’s why I tried to end on a high note (to emphasize yet again: _it’s a great start_). What I’m trying to say is that I hope it doesn’t stop there, for GitHub or anyone else. The incentive to do it is higher when there’s good PR coming out of it, and that is mostly true the first time around. I’m hoping that there are more incentives at play than just PR (genuinely, not in a “but I don’t think so” way).
Is that enough to be allowed to have an opinion?
Or..
I can say "thank you for your supporting open source" and skip all the stuff about acting like a sanctimonious jerk on HN for magic points.
Right now, you're being that guy in a lot of these comments.
But I want to make one thing clear: I’m not doing this for HN karma. I haven’t commented on here in years, and this article prompted a reaction. Trying to somehow shoehorn that into "you’re only doing this for points” is invalidating that in a way that I find troubling, because, really, how can I prove you wrong? I might just have an opinion on something and wanted to engage with a community about it, or I might not. Only I can tell (and you, apparently).
EDIT: Correction. I submitted two comments 2 months ago that I forgot about, the comments before that are from 2019.
Microsoft revenue is $160B. Have they donated $2.6 billion to open source this year?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31720356
Archive link to the article, seems down at the moment.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220618225755/https://blog.jaib...
This is an uncharitable interpretation of this initiative. What makes you think so?
But you’re right: in the end trying to find out what their actual motives are is purely speculation, and I shouldn’t have phrased it as if it were a fact.
Presumably people are just as or even more upset at all the other companies who use open source internally but don't give cash like this to large numbers of open source projects? Right? [insert Anakin Padme meme] If all big companies donated $500K a year to open source, that'd be a pretty significant change in the environment, wouldn't it?
I have noticed for a while that HN comments lean really anti-Github. I don't really understand why.
If those other companies stood to gain as much for $500K spent on marketing, they'd be doing it too.
GitHub isn't somehow more benevolent than all the others. I happen to like GitHub for the product it provides. I just find corporate marketing using maintainers as a proxy is lame. But good for the people who received the money, however.
Just because GitHub might get something out of it does not make it bad.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the complainers’ employers paid a tiny, one time $550 to open source projects they depend on.
I often see that a corporation spends e.g. $1M on a marketing blitz about a $50,000 donation, or runs some campaign where consumers need to do something for some very nominal donation somewhere.
The cynic in me also looks at this as a bribe. Someone who got a $500 gift is much more likely to stay on github. Do that for the top 1000 projects, and you've stemmed the flow to gitlab.
The cynic in me became a lot more cynical when github started selling my own code back to me with copilot.
Now, this is a pseudonymous account so you obviously don’t know whether you use my projects. Just donate to whatever you use.
To expand: I see grandstanding all the time. I see precious little money flowing into my PayPal tip jar. Casual users of my completely free web services have been a lot more generous than companies/developers using my open source libraries/tools. I’m completely fine with the lack of donations, but that certainly makes all the grandstanding from stingy people who don’t give a dime very annoying.
1. From my observation, donors tend to appreciate other donors a bit more.
2. I’ve confronted a few of these people in the past. When asked how much they donated, the answer was always I don’t donate because excuses X, Y, Z. But rich companies/people must donate more; they’re all PR stunts; blah blah.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeZ3_OtDa7E
2. I only work on open source. My income is at most half of what it would be if I worked on proprietary software. I do donate to other projects, and I do appreciate (serious) donors. I've never gotten (or asked for) tips, but I've gotten one or two donations big enough to make a difference.
3. I would also encourage you to read about how con artists (and marketers) manipulate people by generate reciprocity:
- Someone on the street hands you a "free" pamphlet / flower / etc. and asks for a donation.
- Thought leaders are sent a free product
- Managers / executives are wined and dined just below what conflict-of-interest laws allow
... and so on.
I don't appreciate being manipulated. I have turned down gifts and donations before which felt in bad faith.
Why you think that it applies here?
However, my experience is that cost structures at FAANG, Microsoft, etc. are astronomical. In abstract, if the CEO decides to donate $500k and make a blog post, things can sometimes be relatively fast and easy.
In practice, usually one person spends a few weeks or months working to make a case for it, which bounces around the reporting channels, approvals, etc. Communication about it is approved through legal and marketing. Legal brings up issues about what to do if a maintainer is in Cuba and subject to Cuban embargoes, China and subject to Chinese taxes, or the Talysh-Mughan Autonomous Republic.
Median compensation is around $350k (and total cost close to double that). Basically anything external-facing like this usually ends up costing a lot by small business standards. $500k is 0.0003% of Microsoft's annual revenues, or on the order of magnitude of the annual cost of 1 employee (or 0.0006% of the organization). At a trillion-dollar scale, it kinda makes sense to have process. A mistake can wipe out single-digit percent of stock value overnight.
My experience, also, is that the process doesn't improve quality. It just prevents stupid shit from going out.
How much more they needed to spend to make also blog post PR and other PR stuff, in addition to donations?
It's not punishment. I think everybody here would reply in the same way if someone asked a week ago "what if GitHub donated $500 to top-1000 OSS projects?"
A company gives to open source projects.
People complain about how little it is, and generate negative PR for the donation.
For a company, negative PR is a punishment.
What's the lesson here? At least the lesson some in the HN community are teaching is that if you are a big company and you donate to open source projects, you will generate negative PR for yourself.
(We can assume and/or question their motivations, but to me, motivations are almost always irrelevant to an act of generosity. Feel good about yourself if you help others out! Garner positive PR if you help others out as a company! Why should positive things for the giver detract from an act of generosity? Got a problem with the system? That's a problem with the system, not the person or company being generous.)
You're coming off as a very bitter actor, with all comments verging on trolling.
I'm sure if some other company donated $0.5M to FOSS maintainers the negativity would be greatly muted or even absent.
Microsoft uses these platforms to advertise/promote. I don't like it. Advertising and PR are pollution. If Coca-Cola PR or big oil or the tobacco industry promoted on this website, I'd have a similar distaste for it.
When you compared the payments to "blood money" I was like "Oh my", but then I recalled an article that points out that Bill Gates knew Epstein "decades prior to 2011" ( https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/05/investigative-reports/t... ) and I throw up my hands (and my breakfast.) What a world we live in, eh?
You're a traveller in a lesser economically developed country. You're in the wilderness, you haven't seen anyone in a while. You see a stranger, who sees you're travelling alone and invites you to a meal, eager to share a part of their life with you.
Now this is how GitHub is acting:
At the end, you reach into your pocket for a note of the local currency, the stranger shakes his head.
You continue taking out a nominal amount.
"No", the stranger says in his language. You insist, putting the note into his hand. The stranger looks offended. You smile, oblivious.
"THANK YOU VERY MUCH!" You repeat and kill the stranger's act of altruism.
But I don't think it is anything more than marketing on the side of GitHub. And I think what annoys people is when people seem to think it is more than that.
But the maintainers aren’t “their” maintainers. They are maintainers using GitHub for their projects.
Probably just me overreacting, just thought I’d mention it.
They are the ones complaining about both GitHub giving money to maintainers and spending money on marketing.
To those people: there's no harm being done by this and there is good. That's how you judge something like this.
The same phenomenon applies to reluctance to remunerate blood donations.
> Some studies in psychology and economics have found that material incentive discourages prosocial behaviors and causes decrease in blood supply.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2847338/
I think the one-off donation to be completely tin-eared. They should offer to pay a salary to developers working on critical infrastructure, Jetbrains effectively did this with Nikita Popov, or leave open source alone.
GitHub has shown they are naive regarding psychology around this area.
Also while I'm familiar with the debate around incentives for blood donations that particular paper you have cited is terrible.
Notably they do a literature review where they find discussions about how it could theoretically undermine motivations, but don't address the counter-argument they mention themselves where they list example of rewards being used to successfully increase supply! They list studies where it both decreased and increased supply, which seems to indicate that the type of incentive and the conditions in which it was offered make a significant difference.
They end up arguing that there are risks that incentivized donors come from groups of higher risk of infectious blood diseases. This may or may not true, but is a different argument to if incentives work.
Having people talk about whether 500k is the right amount to donate for a gigantic company like Microsoft is much better than people discussing the ethics, legality, trustworthiness and pricing of copilot.
Last week we talked about whether or not it is legal to use license x to train their AI or if they will secretly steal our proprietary code and accidentally leak it for everyone else to see. Today we talk about whether the nice gesture for maintainers are enough.
[0]: Organizations will have at least a 10% fee taken from GitHub once the beta is finished. There's also no guarantee that personal accounts will remain fee-less too, this could easily be "just another" spot where a company offers something for free for mass adoption and then charges for it later. In any case it's marketing for a feature that provides revenue to GitHub.
But as someone that tended to create orgs for projects rather than have it all under a personal account, should I move all of the projects? I guess so, right?
What's the recommended way to move Go repos without breaking them for all users? (I have low-thousands of stars, but the largest project is used by mid-thousands of projects - so I anticipate breakage for my hopeful $5 one-off solo sponsor).
Something like using a vanity import path for all projects? https://sagikazarmark.hu/blog/vanity-import-paths-in-go/
You currently have some number of org repos; eg: my-project/my-project, foobar/foobar
And you have your personal account: buro9.
You use your personal account to commit and maintain those org repos.
As long as you set your personal account as an admin/maintainer on those org repos, I think you get all the benefits you need? I don't think there's any benefit to moving eg my-project/my-project to buro9/my-project
Context - Github copilot license violations.
I'd love to be able to filter by language. My main work is not JS and my JS dependencies are kind of incidental to it, but JS repos dominate the listing for me, I guess just by how JS is so dependency prolific.
I feel like I should qualify this further. I actually missed the original email and spent a day or so realising friends and open source colleagues were being recognised, whilst believing my own OSS wasn't in the mix. And I was pleased for them.
I've been doing OSS for more than a decade. I enjoy it. I wish companies directly supported it, as paying for what you value is responsible and wise. GitHub just did that. Thank you GitHub. I appreciate it. This was a good thing. Well done!
Hey fartcannon, I think you're saying that GitHub surprising open source developers with cash gifts is analogous to governments compensating families for killing relatives. My only thought on this is: I hope that you're okay, and if you need help I hope you'll seek it. It's been a tough few years.
This is really a disgusting way to try to demean the person you are talking to that is all too common. Instead of making thinly veiled attacks on the integrity of other commenters try responding to their arguments.
I have great empathy for the parent because I've also ascribed disproportionate malice to benign corporate behavior, and at that time it was helpful for me to be asked, "Hey, do you have other stuff going on that you might need to deal with?". I've also been on the other side of it, receiving death threats on behalf of a multinational corporation because of meaningless marketing or technical decisions. Both are shitty places to be.
Take care.
Could you find one developer that stopped caring about license violations just because of the money they received?
If I answer "Me", what is going to change for you?
Moreover, why would be so hard for people to separate judgement between specific issues and the company as a whole? As in, Microsoft is still a corporation that is not going to get my sympathy, but we can still acknowledge that giving some money to FOSS developers is better than not giving anything.
The general developer population (people who use but don't necessarily contribute to open source) sees a payment in support of open source and moves on. It's a PR campaign aimed at copilot users who aren't directly affected but found the whole episode discomforting.
That cuts both ways. One could just as easily make the case that this PR move can lead to other companies interested in supporting FOSS.
My point is: instead of judging the merit of "they are doing this for PR", why don't you judge the merit of the action, and simply ignore the meta-opinion about how they are spinning the story?
But they don't have that sort of history, so "why are they starting now as opposed to years ago?" is a natural question to ask.
Again: you are fully entitled to like or dislike Microsoft. But if you hear "BigCorp gave $500k to FOSS" and your opinion of this depends on "which BigCorp did it?", I'll take it as a sign that your opinion is biased and should be completely ignored.
VS Code is literally Microsoft's own product, which they wrote in-house and subsequently open-sourced. I'm having a very hard time imagining how "EEE" could apply here.
Ta da
I don't think that vscode could exists without them, theyre responsible for almost all smart features.
If Microsoft didn't fight FOSS so aggressively, perhaps the world would support it more. Instead, Microsoft alone will profit, and they tossed a couple people a one time tiny sum.
So yes, well done Github, you've further divided a community.
Change happens slowly. This is a small step in the right direction.
For those of you who complained about the money, you people need to reflect on your attitudes and what brought you to this point.
Ugly.
I’m not a maintainer but adjacent to the tech industry (Ed tech) and am hurting for money due to inflation, and I live in a low cost of living area.
You don’t know everyone’s situation. Stop judging them.
However, this is about public open source projects. You can earn money with those projects. But then you also have to clearly communicate this. Either by asking for donations, sponsorship or offer a support contract. Because the default model of open source is: Here is some code, here is the license, feel free to use it without going through a paywall first.
I can and will judge them, especially the ones who complain about this money specifically because of their choices.
(Meanwhile, you solely mention the PR aspect of this act, as if there is no other benefit in the equation. There are two general entities that will benefit from this, although some here seem to prefer no benefit whatsoever befall GitHub/MS and even want to turn this into negative PR. Anyway, assuming it does turn out to be net-positive PR for GitHub/MS, then 900 devs as well as GitHub/MS will benefit from this act.)
I don't think it's the same thing as calling names; it's an important distinction to me to criticize actions and not people, and that's what your parent did.
Many here are criticizing the actions of GitHub/MS. That's fair, but we can also criticize the act of criticizing just the same.
(Again, I might agree with you if bringing "respect" into it could be seen as having a similar effect as name-calling in the sense that it makes the discussion more personal than it needs to be.)
This is why most high volume OS maintainers are either employed by companies just to maintain the code or they are younger with less life commitments.
Any technical project requires focus, and if I paid the bills with something else, I wouldn't have time and space to focus.
I've never been particularly successful with side projects until they became full-time projects. I don't know many other people who have. Side projects are great for exploring, but when one gains traction, to be successful, I've always needed to find a way to focus on it full-time (which means using it to pay the bills).
Here, I don't think it applies.
There are plenty of open source maintainers who do it for the good of sharing knowledge and enabling others under no expectation of pay.
We’re not the computers we program.
And I disagree that it’s the complainers that need to self-reflect. If I had received $500 even in the times I was making the equivalent of ~300EUR per month from such huge assholes like MS, I would honestly have been very conflicted about accepting the money in the first place and in no way would have jumped to their defense.
For most financially successful open source projects that’s exactly how they start.
Thank you for writing exactly as you did, it’s frustrating for the “old timers” coming from the hacker culture of yore to grapple with the money grubbers.
If someone wants to put their work in the public domain and only leave a note in their README that they don't want this to be used for profit and then complain when a company uses it a way they don't like then I 100% agree and support them.
This is the problem with laws and rules. They tend to replace independent moral thought. Instead of asking whether it was right or wrong for that company to use it without the consent of the author, we all get stuck on "well, technically". There's a difference between legal rights and morals.
tl;dr: Some people choose not to participate in the copyright system simply because they wanna push back against us offshoring our abilities to think critically about morals to regulatory bodies. Open source isn't "an act of charity". It's a lot of things to a lot of people
This sounds like the Creative Commons NonCommercial licenses. Too bad they aren't recommended for code too. https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpre...
Many high-profile Free and Open Source software projects are developed mainly by paid employees. Some examples: the Linux kernel, OpenJDK, Firefox, and Chromium.
I've been solo maintaining my project since 2008 and average about ~425,000 downloads/week per NPM. My sum total of donations prior to GitHub's was maybe $5. Making money on a JavaScript library was certainly never my goal but I sincerely appreciate the acknowledgement that my project has worth that someone is willing to pay for.
[0]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/jssha
It's a niche project (even more so when I started it to salt/hash passwords client side during the expensive SSL days) so it's almost never worth advertising :)
Would you feel the same way if they'd said "We're adding new features for our users"?
I suspect the maintainers would definitely say they are a user of GitHub. Most would not say they are a maintainer of GitHub (at least I don’t think so).
To pick the most adverse example: GitHub could equally talk about Gitlab and say "Our competitor". They're clearly not saying Gitlab belongs to them or giving them some kind of connection that doesn't exist.
It’s sounds more (to me) like calling someone else’s kids one of your children because they are visiting your house.
Anyway, I can only imagine how uninteresting this conversation must be to anyone else :)
Examples here: https://twitter.com/philliphaydon/status/1541021821637922816
Just need to figure out how to disable that css option.
Thanks for the info!
On the other hand, this does nothing for me as a Free software fanatic to make Github and Microsoft any more palatable. I still can't believe that a closed, proprietary centralized webapp has so completely co-opted both the git DCVS and FOSS itself. (I've heard people unironically call Github the "flagship of the FOSS movement".)
The image I get is of the boss riding by in a gilded carriage casting handfuls of gold coins to the serfs.
Some of the comments here are of the "shut up and be grateful" ilk, and some even try to shame people for not being sufficiently grateful and/or uncritical. I call BS on that.
If Github/MS find themselves in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation in re: supporting FOSS maintainers it's only because of their own actions and history.
If they really wanted to thank FOSS folks they could open source Github, eh? Or Windows.
To the rest, congratulations and thank you from those of us who thanklessly use your hard work. I hope this kind of public appreciation takes off and we see more large names using this as a template.