GitHub Launches Sponsors, Lets You Pay Your Favorite Open-Source Contributors (techcrunch.com) 85
GitHub today launched Sponsors, a new tool that lets you give financial support to open-source developers through recurring monthly payments. Developers will be able to opt into having a "Sponsor me" button on their GitHub repositories and open-source projects will also be able to highlight their funding models, no matter whether that's individual contributions to developers or using Patreon, Tidelift, Ko-fi or Open Collective. TechCrunch reports: The mission here, GitHub says, is to "expand the opportunities to participate in and build on open source." That's likely to be a bit controversial among some open-source developers who don't want financial interests to influence what people will work on. And there may be some truth to that as this may drive open-source developers to focus on projects that are more likely to attract financial contributions over more esoteric projects that are interesting and challenging but aren't likely to find financial backers on GitHub.
The program is only open to open-source developers. During the first year of a developer's participation, GitHub (and by extension, its corporate overlords at Microsoft) will also match up to $5,000 in contributions. For the next 12 months, GitHub won't charge any payment processing fees either (though it will do so after this time is over). GitHub tells me that developers will be able to set up multiple sponsorship tiers with benefits that can be set by the developer, too. In many ways, then, this isn't all that different from sponsoring a Twitch streamer, for example, with monthly payments and special benefits depending on how much you pay.
The program is only open to open-source developers. During the first year of a developer's participation, GitHub (and by extension, its corporate overlords at Microsoft) will also match up to $5,000 in contributions. For the next 12 months, GitHub won't charge any payment processing fees either (though it will do so after this time is over). GitHub tells me that developers will be able to set up multiple sponsorship tiers with benefits that can be set by the developer, too. In many ways, then, this isn't all that different from sponsoring a Twitch streamer, for example, with monthly payments and special benefits depending on how much you pay.
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Now its all about the "words" in the comments.
Supporting the lifestyles of the people who write code in their "free" time after work.
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No, it was originally all about freedom to replace existing binaries with your own, better ones. The same hippy who wanted this freedom also wanted the it to be free as in beer as well.
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RMS's "free software" movement pre-dates Microsoft's "domination of the software market". The printer driver incident happened in 1980, when Microsoft's biggest success was a BASIC interpreter. GNU dates from 1983, and the FSF from before Windows 1.0. MS-DOS was doing well, but Microsoft was still one of many.
There is no question that Microsoft's bad 1990s behavior drove a lot of growth in the movement, but you used the word "originally".
Re:Why would I pay for open source? (Score:5, Insightful)
Money does have a certain motivating factor.
I've written a bunch of Free Software. I've also written and run a few online games. The simple fact that people donate money to you sometimes keeps you going when you don't want anymore and you pull through that phase. It doesn't even have to be much - even at the most "profitable" times, I earned ten times as much in my regular job. But the simple fact that people sent you some money created a feeling of responsibility that doesn't exist if they press a "like" button on your repository or FB page.
The basic idea isn't bad. But anyone who has Microsoft in there in any capacity is a fool to think they won't sooner or later use it against you. Getting in bed with Microsoft is a sure way to getting fucked over. Always has been. Ask the many companies that... oh, wait... most of them aren't around anymore.
Re: Why would I pay for open source? (Score:1)
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A persons "free" project becomes a list of requests for money?
From Mac and Windows users?
What comes first? The project moves in new directions? What the requests for paying users say to keep supporting?
A person has their free time and project become a list of requests to keep working on support?
Re: Why would I pay for open source? (Score:1)
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The author will now have to consider the requests of the people doing the "paying".
The direction the project was to go in could change to a lot of support requests.
The bug and support requests by "paying" users. Users who now expect a working and supported product for their support.
That the author has to become responsive to support requests?
A new distraction for hours from actual work on the once "free" project
Re: Why would I pay for open source? (Score:1)
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Re: Why would I pay for open source? (Score:1)
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Thats the change to what was once free.
The "clue" is in the new flow of money and what a parson will have to do to keep getting more money
Re: Why would I pay for open source? (Score:1)
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Stop with the smiley faces. It just makes you look like a smiling idiot. They are *contributions*. There are no contractual obligations. You sound like the idiot who buys a woman a drink and expects to get laid.
That was in the Gillette thread.
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becuz can haz cheeseburder
Recurring monthly payments to Microsoft (Score:1, Interesting)
I'd love to send payments to developers without sending payments to Microsoft (I'm sure they skim a percentage so now they have found a way to monotize OpenSource projects for themselves).
Re:Recurring monthly payments to Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
From the announcement (https://github.blog/2019-05-23-announcing-github-sponsors-a-new-way-to-contribute-to-open-source/):
"As a thank you for these valuable contributions, GitHub Sponsors charges zero platform fees when you support the work of other developers. We’ll also cover payment processing fees for the first 12 months of the program to celebrate the launch. 100% percent of your sponsorship goes to the developer."
Re:Recurring monthly payments to Microsoft (Score:4, Informative)
In the future, we may charge a nominal processing fee.
https://help.github.com/en/art... [github.com]
Like how Facebook was ad-free for years.
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but once you've gotten used to the idea and forgotten about how its a thing, then we'll skim our cut. Corporate revenues need to be maintained after all.
Re:Recurring monthly payments to Microsoft (Score:4, Informative)
You don't even need to send payments through GitHub. The platform supports OTHER payment systems as well like Patreon and Ko-fi integration. So, no, you don't need to worry about Microsoft in this one either (like all the other MS fud since they purchased GitHub)
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Name something that didn't go south after it was acquired by Microsoft.
Sure it may take time, but fool me once...
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Skype still works fine on Linux. We use it for international calls. Cheap. Works.
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You're probably using the app, or the windows client.
Like most software on Linux, it isn't "flaky" at all. I've been using it since before MS bought it, and it never crashes.
If you said it was klunky, sure; the current version has awful automatic audio settings. I have to switch the configuration from Stereo Output to Analog Surround 5.1 for it to work right... on stereo speakers with nothing plugged into the surround ports.
But it works exactly the same all the time. And the call quality is higher than the
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Microsoft isn't in this for the payment processing fees, that'd be absurd.
It's not hard to see how a giant software corporation might benefit from forging business relationships with huge numbers of software developers, and from having all the data on how much the community [financially] values particular contributors relative to others. They could hardly design a better recruiting tool.
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Then the extend part is announced.
Give it a year AC and see what happens
Hello money! (Score:2)
So I can put "Hello world" on Github, add a "sponsor me" button, donate $5k to myself and get $10k in return?
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Woo hoo! A soccer legend replied to me!
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Also, you can put up a "hello world", and then 'sponsor' $5000 of dirty drug money, and receive $5000 'clean' money, plus $5000 from microsoft, which let's be honest, wasn't exactly earned entirely honourably (and in some cases, not even legally).
Would rather see feature / bug bounties (Score:3)
Always wondered why no one has set this up yet. I feel like if we had such a system set up 15 years ago, at the very least we'd probably have a decent GUI file manager by now.
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Such a thing does sort of exist, Bountysource:
https://www.bountysource.com/teams/duplicati/issues
here's the page for one of the projects that I use, for example. It's linked to github.
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The rates seem incredibly low on that site.
$110 for "remote management", which is a huge project. Centralized management system, with security, admin/client accounts etc. If they paid a professional developer it would cost them about 1000x that much to get a basic version 1.0 running.
That's the basic problem with all these tipping systems. They are okay for minor things that you can wrap up in an hour or two, but not "quit your job and work on it for 6 months" features that people really want.
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Given how productive a motivated and competent programmer ca
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I expect to see the mount point and physical device info easily attached to directories and the devices in the left-hand pane. I expect that if I do an operation on a large batch of files and it runs into an error with one of them (e.g. filename collision), it should keep running on the rest of the files and not halt in its tracks. I expect it to have an undo function. If
Bitcoin (Score:1)
libre developers are excluded (Score:3)
i've written about this before. libre developers are excluded from participating, and therefore excluded from receiving sponsorship. the reason is very simple: github is a non-free "Service as a Software Substitute" https://www.gnu.org/philosophy... [gnu.org]
if you are a libre developer, it is therefore extremely hypocritical to be utilising a proprietary non-free service to even *develop* libre software. consequently, it may be viewed as being an out-and-out betrayal of the ethical principles on which software libre is founded.
as an indirect result of this, no libre developer may receive the sponsorship funding that is being offered, because the funding is conditional on signing up to a non-free proprietary service, in the process destroying that developers' chances of ever being trusted by the wider libre software community to stand up for ethcal principles.
interestingly, likewise, no libre developer may be a mentor of, or be a recipient of Google SoC sponsorship, for similar reasons: google forcibly demands "real names" for participation in GSoC (which is an incredibly dangerous precedent that i've also spoken about in the past).
so that's not one but *two* very large corporations engaging in questionable tactics that serve *their* interests rather than those of the software libre community - the same software libre community that created the very software on which their massive profits are based.
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How is this different from getting paid by a company? Or in the case of Google SoC, assignment of copyright (via a real name) to the FSF for libre (?) software contributions?
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This is a great example of why, while I value lots of libre software, I do not subscribe to the Free Software Movement philosophy.
I value Freedom, not Freedom(TM)(R)(C)(L). I don't give a rats ass about all these pushy exceptions to Freedom that the Free Software Movement insists are righteous. I agree they're free to do things that way, I just don't agree that insisting on the details of what other people do actually counts as respecting or supporting their Freedom.
That's why, if I'm using a software tool,
opt-in? (Score:2)
for OSS projects on github this should not be opt-in but opt-out.
by default the project gets the button and anybody who wants to give a thank you in the way of money should be able to do so easily, probably the only way a lot of people can and know how to contribute to the project.
the opt-out button should allow the option of having the 'donations' go to charity or to be fully disabled.
Pay them? (Score:1)
Why would I pay these people anything when I can torrent what I want? If I'm not paying Microsoft, Adobe, et al, why would I pay these people? Everything is free for the taking. No one deserves to make money off of their work.
oh look (Score:3)
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The whole program will probably turn out to be an AI-driven fraud-detection API, but the government wouldn't buy it without a real-world test.