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GitHub Sponsors

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Re: GitHub Sponsors

#121

Post by fesoliveira »

rqs wrote: post #84
marktani wrote: post #41

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! [1] https://opencollect…

> 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. https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-github-sponsors

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.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#122

Post by kkarakk »

_v7gu wrote: post #39
nstart wrote: post #15

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…

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 t…

nah it'd be better if you could just tip a developer, i'm more inclined to do a large one time "impulse" donation instead of a continuous drip feed

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)

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#123

Post by kkarakk »

zawerf wrote: post #43
mushufasa wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing part of the waitlist requires an application where they gather info for fraud prevention. 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 :).

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.

Well the IRS would have something to say about it for sure, i doubt github would hide the transactions from them...

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#124

Post by codetrotter »

diggan wrote: post #78
amirathi wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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, tha…

> 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.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#125

Post by icebraining »

usrusr wrote: post #116

I think it's a very compelling deal: under the patreon model (company takes a cut to fund the funding mechanism), the "platform tax" is a permanent sore that makes donating feel less good than it could. Am I giving to the cause or am I giving to the platform? An independent zero fee platform run entirely on altruism will always be in the edge of failure, with one of the failure modes being transfer to untrustworthy o…

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

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#126

Post by diggan »

sneak wrote: post #117
diggan wrote: post #59

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…

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

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.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#127

Post by throwaway_7718 »

sktrdie wrote: post #109

Sorry to bring my ethical and philosophical view on the subject but I don't agree with forcing a capitalist system to something that is essentially volunteer work. Open source has worked fine being just volunteer for the past several decades. In fact I'd argue it's one of the only ecosystem that keeps on being awesome. I don't think adding money to the equation will change any of this. In fact it might risk making it…

I feel the same way, honestly. Thinking of it in a different way - torvalds and gregkh get paid by the Linux Foundation. Say it went bankrupt, they would surely need to get other jobs, unless they were sponsored by the community. Many developers of the kernel today are sponsored by their employers. The question is, how many of them would do it (out of sheer enthusiasm) if they aren't getting paid to?

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#129

Post by throwaway_7718 »

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

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#130

Post by lasagnaphil »

Leace wrote: post #65
diggan wrote: post #59

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…

> 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?…

(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.

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