[devonzuegel]

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 [e-mail] as well.

[mherrmann]

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 "hey, there's someone who'd sponsor you", then I feel this could significantly increase the uptake of this feature on both the sponsor and the maintainer side.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19990110

[neurotrace]

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.

[mceachen]

I'm in your shoes too. I've got 457 stars (and I don't think I've ever un-starred a project).

I think it'd be a reasonable default for most people to start with though.

Perhaps offering the projects that you `watch` a higher priority than those you've starred would be a fairer default?

[whatever_dude]

This is interesting, but it raises questions, mainly: if a project is abandoned and you've still given it a star, does it continue to send money to it? Will it cause people to un-star projects?

I could see having some kind of "tip amount" per project that gets taken from a pool would make a lot of sense, but not as stars.

[winsome]

Doesn't that problem still exist though? Say you sponsor a project individually and it eventually goes unsupported. Would your sponsorship live on if you never manually cancelled it?

Using stars as a proxy for sponsorship, I think, is the wrong idea anyhow. Sponsorship should imply star, but not the inverse. I think what would be best is an easy way to sift through your starred projects and "upgrade" them to a sponsorship. Then once you've done that once, you can manage stars and sponsorships independently going forward.

[mgalgs]

They could factor in the repo's "pulse". More active projects get a bigger slice.

[mietek]

No, they shouldn’t, because doing that would incentivise improper activity.

[hanniabu]

This would be a nice feature, less overhead for the donator too as the amount donated can automatically be split up among all of your starred projects. Bonus points to offset a sponsor dashboard where you can use a slider to change the percentage splits. In the future a budget feature can be added for sponsored projects and this dashboard can show which projects haven't yet met their budget for the month or quarter, similar to the banners that show on wikipedia, "this is an open source project and need x amount in order to keep operations going smoothly, if everyone donates y amount that will fund development for z time period."

[hanniabu]

This dashboard could also have suggestions for sponsoring projects that you either forked or use as a dependency in your project.

[bboreham]

If I forked a repo it’s because I was making a PR to fix something. It says nothing about whether I’m still depending on that code.

[diggan]

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?

[stephenr]

> 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.

[diggan]

Well, they trying to put themselves in the middle of open source. Why wouldn't they, if they really care about their users, not just getting profits?

[stephenr]

> if they really care about their users, not just getting profits?

[citation needed]

[diggan]

It's a for-profit company who "loves" open source and hosts a lot of it's projects. But the platform is still not open source. Go figure

[hanniabu]

This would be nice if there was some integration between the two.

[dangjc]

Will this support micro payments like $1 or even $0.10 a month? Or would credit card fees eat all that up?

[hanniabu]

Would be great if they could get Stripe on board with this and support 0 fees due to the application.

[huac]

interchange fees are attributable mostly to card networks (e.g. visa) and not stripe

[nosequel]

$1 / month is already one of the options.

[dopeboy]

Devon, as a contributor to a major open source project, this is really really awesome news. Thanks for all the hard work on it.

In lieu of helping out OSS, your CEO put out a proposal awhile back about offering desk space to contributors of OSS [0]. Is this still in consideration?

[0] - https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1103919494894772226

[TheRealWatson]

1 - I can imagine sending money to every country isn't a simple deal. Which countries of residence will initially be allowed to receive (and send) payments?

2 - How a potential sponsor knows, without a lot of research, who is deserving of their sponsorship? Will this possibly cause people to change the way they contribute to OSS to make them more visible/noisy and create unhealthy competition?

[beat]

This is a brilliant idea whose time has come, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it plays out.

I'm especially looking forward to seeing how it plays in the corporate arena; I'd love to see businesses that depend on open source every day (that is, all of them) throwing what is just pocket change to them at projects enabling their business. I hope you're planning on encouraging this behavior!

[swaggyBoatswain]

Really excited for this new feature!

Would the sponsorship be a subscription model or can you also do a one time payment donation?

[TheRealWatson]

https://help.github.com/en/articles/sponsoring-a-developer

[C4stor]

How many sponsoring circles have you detected already ?

I can't believe people able to be sponsored aren't doing background stuff to make sure they get free $5K a month from github, since it's a simple as doing a reciprocal sponsoring.

Heck, anyone with a bit too much cash can just offer to be payed to sponsor, let's say you give me 1 unit, I sponsor 0,9 upon payment, you get 1,8 from github.

TL;DR : really surprised you went with matching sponsoring, aren't you worried about this, is this just cost of doing business, or are you actively detecting it ? (and how if discloseable ?)

[smudgymcscmudge]

GitHub is vetting applicants. If they do get hoodwinked, they are at least getting hoodwinked into giving money to somebody they thought was doing worthwhile work to begin with.

[C4stor]

So your hypothesis is that they'd rather assume this potential cost for the sake of publicity ?

Also, in the "paid to sponsor" scenario they'd be hoodwinke into giving money both to someone worthwhile and someone totally unknown to them. I'd be really curious to know the technical or legal possibles responses.

[TimothyBJacobs]

The whole concept of giving away matching funds is for publicity.

[C4stor]

That's a good point actually, I suppose it doesn't indeed really matters to them where it goes as long as they can say "we gave X to open source projects", X probably being already defined.

[liveoneggs]

Can an organization get sponsored instead of an individual?