would be great if GitHub had some kind of patreon system built in, to make it very easy to do recurring donations. Especially for companies that use open source software for commercial activity, it would be great to have an automated way of paying each month and a culture for that, so that it's almost the default option.
I know there are ways of doing this today, but if it's not super frictionless and integrated into the platform, it's less likely to happen
wow, love it. Look forward to seeing it rolled out - it looks like you can only sponsor individuals for now, would be great to be able to sponsor projects
it looks like you can only sponsor individuals for now
I wonder if that will create some perverse incentives? Will people be as willing to contribute significantly to projects if they know the maintainer is making $1000s and they're getting nothing. Or will they instead rather try to start their own competing project in hopes of capturing some of that revenue.
it does actually look like you can sponsor projects too already, but the payments are not handled by github in those instances, it just links off to another patreon style provider - for example https://github.com/react-spring/react-spring.
I think managing the direction and budgets of open source projects that have many contributors in a fair, effective way is a really interesting problem. There are some blockchain DAO projects where this is handled by voting. Each participant's vote could be weighted by different things - contribution activity, seniority within the project, more traditional board/council structure, whatever. The voting results can also be automatically executed.
Or you could pre-determine and automate how funds will be paid out to contributors - ie. bounties for new features/fixing bugs
Yes! I really hope that this is what Github Sponsors will end up being. They should make it trivial for businesses to spend each month X USD to split between open source projects that they rely on.
They should make it trivial for businesses to spend
Donating money is always incredibly tricky if you work at a larger company, especially if you get nothing in return. I can a buy a license or support contract easily, with a bit more effort I could probably sponsor a local FOSS meetup/event. But just giving someone $50 as a thanks for writing that software we rely on, is basically impossible unless I just pay it out of pocket.
And on the flip side, it would be interesting to have better tools of distributing the funds collected in this way. Ie. how to best allocate the funds between the FOSS project participants/contributors.
Who decides where the funds get spent, how to automate some of it etc
I know there are ways of doing this today, but if it's not super frictionless and integrated into the platform, it's less likely to happen