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GitHub Sponsors

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Re: GitHub Sponsors

#301

Post by neurotrace »

mherrmann wrote: post #229
devonzuegel wrote: post #158

Hi, I’m Devon the product manager behind GitHub Sponsors. We’re excited to launch the beta program today and learn how we can best serve the community. It’s great to already see the conversation on this thread! We’re eager to hear all of your feedback, and feel free to email me at devonzuegel@github.com as well.

Hi Devon, I posted this comment elsewhere in this thread [1], but now feel that here is a better place to write it: It would be very cool if there was an easy way to sponsor all the projects I've starred. Then I could just pay (say) $10 per month to "support open source", without having to worry about any of the details such as picking projects. If you as GitHub then also reach out to the project maintainers and say…

Am I using stars wrong? I have starred 771 projects on GitHub. To me, a star means anything from "I use this" to "I think this is a cool project". Giving $10 a month to 771 projects would result in about a penny for each project.

I'd rather separate starred from sponsored. If I could select a subset of that 771 and say "split $10 among these projects" then I'd be happy.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#302

Post by RandallBrown »

Kirth wrote: post #264
mushufasa wrote: post #5

This seems like it's needed and (dareisay) overdue? Integrating sponsorship subscriptions into the core experience is sure to increase payments, a la twitch subscriptions/payments (which Youtube is just now copying). I imagine this will change the fundamental dynamics around OSS projects, but not sure how, nor whether it is all positive. - If maintainers can see who donated, do they prioritize issues / pull requests?…

> Do companies use GitHub sponsorships to judge the health of dependencies? Will they create budgets to support their dependencies systematically? In my past I've worked with multiple places that absolutely loved open-source. Because to them it was "free". Something they could use in their products and then charge customers for. Often these opportunistic parasites would never contribute anything back; going out of th…

I've also worked at multiple companies where they were afraid of open source because the project might be abandoned.

They would happily pay thousands for a closed source dependency because they could guarantee it would be supported.

This could offer a nice medium where a company can be pretty sure that it will stick around (based on funding) and contribute to make sure that it does.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#303

Post by reggieband »

gilbetron wrote: post #216
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…

I am wary of the excitement as well, but there's a bit difference: corporations. Spending $20/month on a patreon is entirely different than spending the same on a library I make heavy use of at my job. I can easily convince my boss to do that; that type of money isn't even "noise" for most companies!

In my experience at a reasonably large corp ... getting the bureaucracy to spend $20/month is somehow more of a pain than getting it to spend $50,000/month.

For the kind of dollar values most github supporters are working in (probably in the range of less than $1000/year) - a single yearly lump sum would be easier to expense directly on a corporate card rather than getting accounting involved monthly.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#304

Post by nlowell »

pluma wrote: post #195
koolba wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't know whether you're trolling or simply naive but that's clearly fraud and the scenario you describe explicitly aims to commit fraud. At the very least it's violating the terms of service. But very clearly the two of you would have conspired to defraud GitHub and in this case there would even be evidence in the form of an HN comment where you literally ask if this would work. You may think you're clever but tr…

I'm not the other guy, but I honestly don't see an argument for why this is fraud. Is this against the terms? Can you point to a specific line in the terms forbidding this? Your argument just seems like "this is clearly fraud and you can tell by looking at it"...

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#305

Post by ac29 »

benatkin wrote: post #252
simias wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that unsustainable? What are they spending that money on? Isn't it only unsustainable for VCs who want 10e50% growth ever three days?

It's unsustainable for handling small payments. Things like fraud detection, customer support, legal and financial services, and credit card chargebacks add up to more than 5%, if it's truly crowdfunding (lots of small contributions). There's a lot of failed startups in the crowdfunding space.

5% is their cut after payment processing, which is another 3% or 5% extra (depending on the size of payment, with smaller payments being more expensive to process).

For a $1 payment, they actually take 20% (10c + 5% + 5%).

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#306

Post by stephenr »

diggan wrote: post #186
devonzuegel wrote: post #158

Hi, I’m Devon the product manager behind GitHub Sponsors. We’re excited to launch the beta program today and learn how we can best serve the community. It’s great to already see the conversation on this thread! We’re eager to hear all of your feedback, and feel free to email me at devonzuegel@github.com as well.

Hello there Devon! I'd be interested to hear what the main reasons for not either a) building on top of existing open platforms (like OpenCollective) or b) doing your own service but building it open source and as a open platform? Also, once the one year period is over, how are you planning to setup the fee structure?

> doing your own service but building it open source and as a open platform

Why would they ever do this? Practically nothing they do is Open Source.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#307

Post by JoshuaRLi »

radium3d wrote: post #290
xwdv wrote: post #280

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 p…

Don't let them manipulate you. Assert your policy that they are paying for the software as it is at the time of donation. I would donate with the same thought without any expectations of further development because of my donation. Only that the software has already helped me in its current state.

Exactly this. The "purity" of OSS development needs to be reflected in the "purity" of donations for this to work. Small donations should represent nothing more than a token of appreciation. Large donations, well... money shouldn't buy project influence, though that is easier said. It's a complicated matter of corporate sponsored engineers contributing both good and bad (influence wise) patches back to OSS, but people need to make a living somehow.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#308

Post by pingucrimson »

techntoke wrote: post #295
pingucrimson wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's a shame the GitHub is starting to actually take advantage of their hosting monopoly, to the detriment of solutions like OpenCollective and Liberapay. On the other hand, Git is distributed. Can't you just use GitHub as a mirror, and direct users elsewhere for actual development through the README?

Or just include external donation links in the readme?

I assume you can't just do that since GitHub might offer to give donors regular activity updates.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#309

Post by briandear »

0xffff2 wrote: post #194
fesoliveira wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>Keep in mind that they will only take a payment processing fee, unlike other services that charge a cut from the payment in order to pay for their services... How are those different exactly?

Credit Processing fees pay the bank/processing fees charged to Github. The Patreon “cut” pays processing fees but it also pays for Patreon’s electric bill, employee salaries, rent, profit.

Github already has the bills paid by paid GitHub accounts. So adding this is simply another feature and the only new real cost to this feature is credit card processing fees. If there are other costs (extra employees, etc.,) that could be counted as a marketing expense.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#310

Post by techntoke »

ElijahLynn wrote: post #276

Your move GitLab!

GitLab actually has an open source SCM platform and developers have always been free to put links to their favorite sponsorship platforms in the readme, wiki or on their GitLab Pages site built using their favorite generators. Your move GitHub.
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