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GitHub Sponsors

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Re: GitHub Sponsors

#271

Post by wpietri »

benatkin wrote: post #209

Not so fast. People have said this about gittip (now Gratipay), Patreon, Twitch, and now YouTube and Facebook. All of these have been mixed blessings. Here's an article about how Patreon doesn't work out even when everything goes smoothly: https://theoutline.com/post/2571/no-one-makes-a-living-on-pa... "After launching my Patreon, I struggled for months to find work. Patreon filled my downtime, and became a full time…

Things like Patreon and Twitch were definitely watershed moments for their respective industries. It's true that, as before, most people doing the thing still won't make much money. But still, a lot of people are now making a living in a way where they are directly responsible to the people they serve, without intermediaries like record companies or publishers.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#272

Post by cwyers »

clarkmoody wrote: post #269
benatkin wrote: post #209

Not so fast. People have said this about gittip (now Gratipay), Patreon, Twitch, and now YouTube and Facebook. All of these have been mixed blessings. Here's an article about how Patreon doesn't work out even when everything goes smoothly: https://theoutline.com/post/2571/no-one-makes-a-living-on-pa... "After launching my Patreon, I struggled for months to find work. Patreon filled my downtime, and became a full time…

The difference here is that companies are already paying GitHub to host private repos, so it's part of their monthly payment flow. With simple nudges toward sponsorship, many companies will chuck in an extra few bucks toward the projects that they build their codebase on top of.

No they won't.

I, and a lot of other people, cannot get accounting at where I work to cut a check for that kind of sponsorship. I can get accounting to cut checks for things that matter. Typically if someone asks what's the difference between paid and free, and you answer, it supports Active Directory, you're most of the way there if you can show a business need for the product. But just a straight-up donation? It's a hard sell.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#273

Post by techntoke »

some_random wrote: post #215
0xffff2 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

They should just use Google Pay API if that is the case. As far as I know they still don't charge fees.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#275

Post by wpietri »

clarkmoody wrote: post #269
benatkin wrote: post #209

Not so fast. People have said this about gittip (now Gratipay), Patreon, Twitch, and now YouTube and Facebook. All of these have been mixed blessings. Here's an article about how Patreon doesn't work out even when everything goes smoothly: https://theoutline.com/post/2571/no-one-makes-a-living-on-pa... "After launching my Patreon, I struggled for months to find work. Patreon filled my downtime, and became a full time…

The difference here is that companies are already paying GitHub to host private repos, so it's part of their monthly payment flow. With simple nudges toward sponsorship, many companies will chuck in an extra few bucks toward the projects that they build their codebase on top of.

Exactly. I was looking a creating a business that was something like Patreon for open source devs. Github already has 98% of what they need for this business. The marginal cost of this is a rounding error for them.

More than that, it's an excellent differentiator for their business, so then can justify all the GitHub Sponsors expenses just as marketing budget. Other people have been replicating the "nice web front-end for Git" part of their business. But this turns GitHub's large audience into a potential revenue source, which will be very hard for other people to duplicate.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#277

Post by zild3d »

zapita wrote: post #80

I’m glad open-source maintainers will get one more way to get paid... But it feels wrong to lock this into a git hosting platform. Maintainer payment is important enough to be a first-class product, open and accessible to all... instead it’s being used as a bargaining chip to keep developers on a hosting platform. The subtext is pretty clear: “if you want to get paid, you better not leave Github!”. Meanwhile nonprofi…

> Meanwhile nonprofits and startups focused on solving the problem of open-source sustainability for everyone, not just Github customers, will suffer from this announcement.

Frankly, those startups/nonprofits haven't done a good enough job. If you want to be paid well in OSS it usually means you have to take on consulting work. If people were able to be paid well for working on OSS directly, there wouldn't be a problem for Github/MS to be solving here

> The subtext is pretty clear: “if you want to get paid, you better not leave Github!”

If you want to get paid as a video creator, you better not leave Youtube either

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#278

Post by VikingCoder »

Awesome!

Some Feature Requests:

1) Let me sponsor a project, not a person

2) Let a project have a private, or a public, allocation of how funding goes. At first, simple percents would be awesome.

3) Let a project assign funding to another project. Probably one it depends on.

4) For a given project, let me see which other projects are funding it.

5) Allow the set up of Unions. These five projects all have one pool where all the money goes, which is then divided back to the projects by some percentage.

6) Fund a charity. If this person or project receives money, please directly send it to a specified charity instead. (Don't make the person who receives the donation have to handle the paperwork for it.)

7) Try to make it easy to set up a sponsorship in your will

8) Let a project use their funding to pay for hosting, directly. So, I give to some project, they pay for CPU and Storage on some cloud host.

I'm certain there are legal complications with all of these ideas. If you solve the legal issues, that would be amazing. Cheers!

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#279

Post by mattbk1 »

Kalium wrote: post #249
patcon wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's got a major company with deep and signficant expertise in security, payments, and accouting. A name that people and companies already trust with a raft of compliance all handled already. Yes, and they are absolutely _robbing_ the opportunity from others to build in this space, when there are already some really capable players who would have gotten somewhere great. This is a total asshole, closed source compan…

What kind of critical engagement do you think we are failing to offer? What kind of response would leave you thinking "This person engaged critically with the issue at hand, but still came away with a strongly positive position"? For my own part, I don't think anybody is owed a position in a space. I also don't think the existence of small players that get displaced by a big player means that the small players were d…

> I also don't think the existence of small players that get displaced by a big player means that the small players were destined to become big players. It's worth considering that LiberaPay and OpenCollective would never have gotten somewhere great. Perhaps they would always have been doomed to be small and essentially irrelevant.

I think the difference between small and big players depends also on what their goals are. If the goals of (first Gratipay and then) Liberapay are to fund cool people and cool work, it doesn't matter how much of the funding space they take up as long as they're paying the bills and surviving. If the goal of GitHub is to make $$$ on fees, then yeah, they're going to feel like every other platform is a threat to that goal.

IMHO, there is much more space for different multiple funding platforms than people realize.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#280

Post by xwdv »

I don’t like this. There has always been a purity around writing open source software simply for the benefit of mankind.

Let’s not kid ourselves, probably no one is going to make a living from github sponsors, and projects that bring in any significant money are probably written by developers who already make good money do something else anyway. This would basically be beer money to them.

You would be amazed at how people that do not contribute any sort of money to an open source software project will come in and make demands to the creator to implement some feature or fix some bug. Now imagine if they donate $10 and suddenly feel like there is a debt the creator must pay to them by doing what they want.

I will not be using github sponsors for my open source projects. Instead I will continue to ask for things like tickets to conferences or speaking engagements where I can better develop my brand and clout. That’s the way it should be, but that’s just my opinion.

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