GitHub announces "GitHub Sponsors"

#news #github

GitHub announced GitHub Sponsors, a new way to sponsor OSS maintainers.

Anyone with a GitHub account can sponsor anyone with a sponsored developer profile through a recurring monthly payment. You can choose from multiple sponsorship tiers, with monthly payment amounts and benefits that are set by the sponsored developer.

What are your reactions?

Top comments (11)

Peter Kim Frank • May 23 '19

This seems pretty natural and powerful. Most open-source projects that I've seen so far seem to use a collection of Patreon, OpenCollective, and a manual process for their sponsorships. Having it integrated into GitHub makes a lot of sense.

It will be interesting to see if this helps pave the way for larger enterprise companies to start paying more substantially and regularly into the open-source projects that they rely on.

I'll also be interested to study @dff_55 's post a bit more closely to look at how Tidelift and others are involved:

Tidelift partners with GitHub, funds 4,000 open source projects

Donald Fischer ・ 3 min read

#opensource #news #technology #programming

Vuild • May 23 '19

dev.to/vuild/comment/alh7 👀🤣

Peter Kim Frank • May 23 '19

👀

Michiel Hendriks • May 24 '19

It will be interesting to see if this helps pave the way for larger enterprise companies to start paying more substantially and regularly into the open-source projects that they rely on.

It won't. There are enough examples where enterprises already had plenty of opertunity to donate money on projects they relied upon, but never paid a dime.

My dear is that this sponsorship will create a market place of premium suport, and lock down project contributions inbfear of reduced benefits.

Andy Zhao (he/him) • May 23 '19

This is pretty awesome. They'll also cover payment processing fees for the first 12 months. I'm wondering what happens after that though.

I also like that they allow you add a list of other funding platforms/models like Patreon, OpenCollective, etc.

Yechiel Kalmenson • May 23 '19

My guess is after that they take off a small percentage to help cover the costs, like pretty much everyone else.

Sung M. Kim • May 23 '19 • Edited

Making it easy to "sponsor" would help promote the OSS.

Sarah-Jane Morris • May 23 '19 • Edited

I'm super hopeful this will open the door to more OS contributions for folks who might not otherwise be able to afford to contribute for free. Eventually, would love to see them roll this out at the org to dev level, so companies can be more intentional about supporting their OS contributors!