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Peter Kim Frank
Peter Kim Frank

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GitHub announces "GitHub Sponsors"

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

From the website:

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)

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peter profile image
Peter Kim Frank

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:

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vuild profile image
Vuild

dev.to/vuild/comment/alh7 πŸ‘€πŸ€£

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peter profile image
Peter Kim Frank

πŸ‘€

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elmuerte profile image
Michiel Hendriks

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.

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andy profile image
Andy Zhao (he/him)

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.

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yechielk profile image
Yechiel Kalmenson

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

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dance2die profile image
Sung M. Kim • Edited

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

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sarahjanemorris profile image
Sarah-Jane Morris • 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!

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victorb profile image
Victor Bjelkholm

Wrote a longer response to this here: dev.to/victorb/the-need-for-open-s...

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jrtibbetts profile image
Jason R Tibbetts

I already support devs through Patreon, but hey, if someone wants to support me via GitHub Sponsorship, I'll gladly take it!

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Theofanis Despoudis

Show me the moneyπŸ’°πŸ’°πŸ’°πŸ’°πŸ€‘πŸ€‘πŸ€‘