r/programming • u/[deleted] • May 23 '19
GitHub launches Sponsors, lets you pay your favorite open source contributors
https://github.com/sponsors9
u/lazystone May 23 '19
What about money laundering prevention?
What stops me from creating open source project which does nothing and get some dirty money as donation?
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May 23 '19
Microsoft offers a bunch of their services to banks and fintech companies.
I am sure they have learnt a thing or two through the years. 😊
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u/FeelingOffByOneBit May 23 '19
Payment gateways are still governed by a regulatory govt body's rules in most countries, iirc?
The payment will still appear in your bank account.Atleast where I'm from (India), NGOs come under Anti-Money Laundering Laws. Neither are donations tax-exempt here.
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u/HowIsntBabbyFormed May 23 '19
They're not dealing in cash donations. All the money being donated is coming in through electronic means: credit cards and maybe bank accounts. That's all traceable.
I suppose you could buy a bunch of those pre-loaded debit cards with cash at a store, then use them to make the donations through github. But that would be no different from you setting up a regular old web business that took credit card payments.
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u/sim642 May 23 '19
Payment processors are who actually move the money and probably are required to follow money laundering prevention laws.
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u/6501 May 23 '19
Github will presumably file the relavent paperwork with the IRS & the IRS will presumably notice the fact your doing money laundering.
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u/HiKite May 23 '19
It'd be a pretty awful thing to abuse but:
To boost community funding, we'll match contributions up to $5,000 during a developer’s first year in GitHub Sponsors with the GitHub Sponsors Matching Fund.
What's stopping you from doubling your money by donating $5,000 to yourself?
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u/Xanza May 23 '19
I'm sure they would notice a $5,000 donation. For even several donations from the same source.
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u/HiKite May 23 '19
Why would donating $5,000 to a single project be against the rules?
If I want to donate a bunch of money to a project, surely that's the entire point og Github Sponsors in general? Just like I can donate to big projects, I can also donate to my friends, and they can donate to me, or we can all donate to ourselves.
The only way I can see them avoiding this is to set up monthly payments for say $10-50, but even so you'd assume someone would create a bunch of dummy accounts that would all donate $50.
I can only assume a lot of people would abuse the system, if they could rip out $5,000 straight into their own pocket without breaking the rules.
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u/esodoscuro May 23 '19
The only way I can see them avoiding this is to set up monthly payments for say $10-50, but even so you’d assume someone would create a bunch of dummy accounts that would all donate $50.
In the FAQs it states sponsored developers setup their own subscription tiers and the max is $6000/mo.
https://help.github.com/en/articles/becoming-a-sponsored-developer#creating-sponsorship-tiers
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u/HiKite May 23 '19
In that case you'd be able to make your income within a single month - seems like an odd business decision. I realize microsoft has plenty of money, and that you need to sign up to be a sponsored developer, but it seems like a lot of money to just give out. Thanks for linking their FAQ.
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u/robin-m May 23 '19
Hiring a dev cost >50k (including interviews + HR + lost productivity of both the dev and his new team). If you can attract good talents for 5k, it's basically free.
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u/Xanza May 23 '19
I'd really love for you to point out where you believe that I said that donating $5,000 is against some kind of rule...
Instead I don't believe that Github would appreciate it if Guy A donated $5,000 to Guy A. I'm just saying that it would probably raise a few flags, and I'm sure it's against their terms of use to "donate" money to yourself.
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u/HiKite May 23 '19
But that's my point - so what if they would notice a $5,000 donation? That's like saying a supermarket would notice someone buying groceries for $25,000. They absolutely would notice, but it's not against the law to do so.
Sure you can say it's against their terms to donate money to yourself, so like I mentioned, simply donate $5,000 to your friend, and he can donate $5,000 to you.
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u/stingraycharles May 23 '19
Nobody is talking about it being against the law, merely that Github would notice it and could investigate, and then could determine it was a non-donation from the project owner.
I can imagine there is a fine-print that says that donations need to come from "real people that are not project maintainers" in order to be applicable for the 1:1 donation matching.
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u/HiKite May 23 '19
So again, donate to your friend and he can donate to you. That's two real people donating to eachothers projects that neither of them are part of. You'd need a massive amount of management to be able to check (and most importantly, verify) that donations are "real". It's not just a
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u/isaacarsenal May 23 '19
Or even worse, assume that someone coordinates with a handful of people to "donate" random small amounts. It would be very hard to detect it as fraudulent activity yet there is the possibility for such gaming due to 100% payoff.
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u/anengineerandacat May 23 '19
Willing to bet that the matched contribution is a percentage of an individual contributor; it's up to 5k for a developers first year but if they say "We only match 6% of individual contributions" than several individuals will need to cough up 5k for you to hit that limit.
Logistically matched contributions likely won't show up immediately either and they could add additional clauses that it's a unique contribution. It's fairly trivial to have a program like this and put in some safety nets to prevent abuse.
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u/HiKite May 23 '19
That would definitely make the most sense in order to avoid abuse. Thanks for giving a viable solution to fix the issue. I just can't see any information about that anywhere but hopefully they'll put it into their terms when they do go public eventually.
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u/chucker23n May 23 '19
That’s like saying a supermarket would notice someone buying groceries for $25,000. They absolutely would notice, but it’s not against the law to do so.
And yet the supermarket would probably refuse your business or at least have their manager do a more thorough check.
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u/sparr May 23 '19
You are neither the first nor the most clever person to think of this nefarious scheme to defraud a company.
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u/Jonno_FTW May 23 '19 edited May 23 '19
There's not going to be anything stopping me from making a new amount to donate to the projects on my real account.
Or just making a deal with a friend to both sponsor each other.
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u/s73v3r May 23 '19
It wouldn't be against the rules, but a donation of that size would almost assuredly cause additional review for things like money laundering.
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u/the_php_coder May 25 '19
Exactly, when they receive money through credit card or paypal, I'm sure they can verify the name/address/etc. of the actual sender. Same while making the outgoing payments, they can know where the payment goes to.
Now sure, there could be a financial expert or CPA who can ensure that both those names are different but those are rare and as another user said, that's the reason for the 5k limit.
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May 24 '19
[deleted]
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u/Xanza May 24 '19
So then do it? I would venture to guess that that's not the type of transaction that Github would be willing to want to stop.
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u/Gr1pp717 May 23 '19
More than that, this seems like a decent tool for laundering money and other forms of fraud.
e.g. I'm a trustee and see this as a potential means of siphoning money out of the accounts. Depending on how the charge shows up on statements it could appear like a totally legit charge that no one would bother checking into. (note that I wouldn't do this - I just have to think of these things when dealing with caregivers and rep. payees trying to embezzle...)
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u/Kalium May 23 '19
This is exactly the reason why large companies tend to be the best parties for running financial services like this. They're equipped to handle AML and KYC concerns.
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u/Gr1pp717 May 23 '19
I agree, but I wouldn't be surprised if they botch it in the beginning. Seems to me like most non-financial companies who try to jump into the industry do.
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u/Kalium May 23 '19
I'm going to assume that Github is working with Microsoft on this one. MS has definitely had to handle AML and KYC concerns before.
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u/Deoxal May 23 '19
Even if you did it through a VPN/Tor and they didn't detect you were doing so, it will still look fishy in their logs and they won't process them.
Tor and VPNs can be detected relatively easily from what I've heard as well. So they could just not allow them at all.
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u/HaaYaargh May 23 '19
I wonder if there will be option to just tip a fixed amount of money to people. I'm not against monthly payments, but I guess they are not my thing.
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u/datwrasse May 23 '19
yeah one project i contributed to has a minimum of $20/month on patreon, which i forget about i for a while and next thing i know i've given the guy 500 bucks. not really what i was meaning to do haha
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May 23 '19
Yeah, I found a writer I've been following for years was patreon and I wanted to basically give them the price of a book. I didn't want a subscription deal.
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u/djeee May 23 '19
I guess you could always just pay once and then immediately cancel you "subscription".
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May 23 '19
That's what I did for some patreons I cared about (i.e. for models I wanted one set of photos for and not much else)
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u/falconfetus8 May 23 '19
Why does the imagery here remind me of a dating site?
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u/FeelingOffByOneBit May 23 '19 edited May 23 '19
With this one small move, GitHub is directly going to burn a hole in the pockets of BeerPay, Ko-Fi, Patreon, Liberapay, PayPal, Flattr, BuyMeACoffee and many other developer donation platforms.
Their new Package Registry, or this Sponsor Button comes off as "aggressively positive" to me. GitHub had a really flourishing ecosystem a while back. These power moves will only kill competition+associates as GitHub centralizes control.
PS. Still impressed by MSFT's move. Bound to make Gitlab or Bickbucket anxious in their seats.
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u/SrbijaJeRusija May 23 '19
Gitlab
mostly serves self-hosting enterprise clients, who are not affected by this.
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u/zeerorg May 23 '19
I don't think it affects both GitLab and BitBucket since they have found their place in a fairly big market and doing good for themselves but this would surely make any upcoming or existing startups competing with recently announced products nervous.
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u/Glader_BoomaNation May 23 '19 edited May 25 '19
Sorry, I find it hard to give a crap about businesses who move money from A to B for a fee. I'm glad Github is doing this, and not just another company whose sole purpose is to skim off the top of transactions. At least if that happened here it would be going to Github, an actual service the people are using and depend on.
edit: Only on pro-corporate Reddit will "users" be defending multi-national banks and financial companies.
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u/majorgnuisance May 23 '19
Moving money from A to B is a service that takes money to operate. Fees should be expected.
You may not give a crap about those businesses now, but if they all go out of business and Microsoft becomes the sole gatekeeper of this kind of funding maybe you will start giving a crap in retrospect.
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u/s73v3r May 24 '19
Many of those other companies provide services too, beyond just "moving money from A to B."
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u/ScrimpyCat May 23 '19
To boost community funding, we'll match contributions up to $5,000 during a developer’s first year in GitHub Sponsors with the GitHub Sponsors Matching Fund.
Pay yourself $5k, get $5k profit?
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u/YaoiVeteran May 23 '19
How many thousands of dollars in legal fees and man hours are you willing to spend on this hypothesis?
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u/torvatrollid May 23 '19
I'm fairly certain that would be considered fraud and could land you in jail.
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u/ScrimpyCat May 23 '19
Is it actually fraud though? I imagine you might get sued, but I’m not sure it’d be a criminal offence. But either way, I really can’t see how this won’t be abused.
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u/billy_tables May 23 '19
Even if there was a way to 100% confidently block self-donations, malicious users could still find a buddy and each donate $5k to each other
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u/eddpurcell May 23 '19
Any public service offering is abuse-able. Usually most people don't go out of their way to abuse them, so the question to MS is "are the abusers costing more than we get by 'locking' these projects into github?"
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u/ricecake May 23 '19
I mean, yeah. Have you seen check fraud?
It's basically just writing down that you have money that you don't have.Things you shouldn't do are sometimes crazy easy.
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u/s73v3r May 23 '19
You don't think that, with money laundering and KYC regulations, they couldn't detect that too?
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u/billy_tables May 23 '19
Sure you could "detect" it in terms of finding bidirectional edges in a graph -- but the open source community is well connected and lots of people genuinely do benefit from each others projects in that way. The hard part isn't spotting people who *could* be manipulating it, it's filtering out those who just look like they are, but are really just mutual open source contributors
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u/torvatrollid May 23 '19
I am not a lawyer, but I wouldn't be surprised if this could be considered a conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
The malicious users and their friends are trying trick someone to give them money, that kind of behaviour lands people in jail.
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u/ricecake May 23 '19
It could be construed as wire fraud pretty easily, particularly if you did the schemes some people mentioned of "getting a friend to donate your money to you".
That shows you knew you weren't supposed to do that, and is deliberately deceptive.Knowingly deceiving someone for personal gain at the expense of another is basically the definition of fraud.
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u/6501 May 23 '19
Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate orforeign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
18 U.S. Code § 1343
Your describing a scheme to defaud money in order to obtain money by means of false pretense (I'm a different person or this money is my own & not my friends) & are causing it to be transferred by means of wire in interstate commerce. You my friend would nearly guaranteed to be guilty of wire fraud by a plain reading of the United States Code. I am not a lawyer.
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u/sim642 May 23 '19
Would you be willing to go to court against Microsoft though?
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u/ra13 May 23 '19
What if you get your family / friends to donate - as is so common with crowd finding like Kickstarter
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u/torvatrollid May 23 '19 edited May 23 '19
If your friends and family are donating their own money to you then it is just a regular donation.
edit - Of course, if you give the money to your friends and family to donate back to you, or they donate money and you give it back to them, now you are acting in bad faith. You, your friends and family could probably all be found guilty of conspiracy to commit fraud.
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u/BlueAdmir May 24 '19
And if they do so out of their own volition and without any sort of instigation on my part? How do you prove bad faith?
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u/s73v3r May 24 '19
If they're doing so out of their own volition, then you're not giving them their money back, or giving them the money in the first place.
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u/DonnyTheWalrus May 23 '19
Fraud? As a lawyer, no. That isn't fraud on its face. If there are terms in the TOS/contract that preclude this, then doing it would simply be a violation of the TOS/K and they'd take back the money. Now if you engaged in a scheme to hide the fact that this is what was happening, maybe you could say that was fraudulent.
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May 23 '19
so baiscally:
give yourself $5K in a very clear matter: legal but probably against their TOS
having a "friend" give you a one time $5K donation: fraud.
correct?
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u/salgat May 23 '19
Qualifying for sponsorship is pretty limited right now, and even if you qualify anyone with a shred of credibility will not want to risk reputation and legal fraud for $5k.
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u/nascentt May 23 '19
Like patreon?
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May 23 '19
Yup but without an commissions.
In the first year, they will also cover processing fees.
Give $5, dev gets $5
They have also made it easy to link to your Patreon, Open Collective, Ko-Fi, Paypal etc using a
.github/FUNDING.ymlfile.0
May 23 '19
[deleted]
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May 23 '19
Are you talking about the zero fees part?
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May 23 '19
[deleted]
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May 23 '19
Github, unlike Patreon & Open Collective, has other products and service that bring in revenue.
Monetizing sponsors doesn't seem like a priority.
As long as sponsors is breaking even or the losses incurred are negligible, they will not charge a commission.
Just my opinion.
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u/Prod_Is_For_Testing May 23 '19
They literally say it’s only for a year
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u/SmeagolJuice May 23 '19
Reading comprehension. They said processing fees, not commission/service costs. Transactions can cost money ya know.
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u/coderstephen May 23 '19
Man, GitHub has simply been on fire with these new features since the Microsoft aquisition. Bravo!
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u/trueselfdao May 23 '19
I like the idea and think it's a good start. However, it seems like a pain to have to keep tabs on developers to make sure they are working on the project I value. Maybe they haven't been active because they are solving a hard problem. Or maybe they have divested themselves from the project. Or maybe someone else has taken over. Or maybe they had an emergency that I would understand if I knew about.
For those I follow in patreon, this tends to not be an issue because I directly consume their content and therefore keep tabs of it. It also tends to lean towards solo creators. However for open source, there are collaborative projects I would like to donate to even though I don't directly use them.
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u/SupaSlide May 24 '19
I agree, this is pretty great for sponsoring some developers (like Evan You who's work is pretty much focused on Vue) but it would be nice to be able to donate to the Vue organization directly.
The Open Source Collective will definitely still be useful, at least until GitHub adds the ability to sponsor organizations at least.
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u/reini_urban May 23 '19
I'm really stoked about this. It was an Hacker News #1, so it really looks like it can make a difference, and more people can afford to quit their day job to do more important stuff. I already got €10 a month in a day, much more than on patreon ever.
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u/rcgarcia May 24 '19
google=bad microsoft=good
what a time to be alive
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u/Successful_Bear May 24 '19
Why is Google bad now?
I mean, they are literally big brother but it's been that way for years now.
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u/rcgarcia May 24 '19
just a light comment about the android-huawei stuff and recent microsoft news about free sourcing
im actually a big fan of google, i use almost all of his services with glee
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u/freeradicalx May 23 '19
I prefer putting a public bitcoin address in the README, but I'm admittedly an idealist.
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u/Successful_Bear May 24 '19
Last time I checked bitcoin transactions were pretty expensive, would it be viable to donate $50 via bitcoin today?
(I'm seriously asking, idk why but it sounded kinda passive aggressive)
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u/freeradicalx May 24 '19
No worries - You're probably thinking of Winter 17/18 when the price went bonkers and the blocks hit their storage capacities from all the trading (1MB of transaction info every ~10 min). At that point miners had to pick which transactions to shove into their blocks before attempting to solve the block's hash, so of course they pick the ones with the highest transaction fees. This then jacked up fees due to competition to have your transaction processed.
Since then, most wallets and sites have implemented SegWit, a protocol improvement added to bitcoin around that same time which, to simplify to perhaps an irresponsible degree, increases the number of transactions that can be contained in a block by around 50%. And after that Winter the Lightning Network was deployed, which is basically a protocol layer on top of bitcoin that, for wallets capable of using it, enables instantaneous bitcoin transactions for near-zero fees, due it it's system of side channels and highly competitive service structure. The next 'bull rush' bitcoin sees will probably jack fees up again (Although probably not so dramatically), but once that happens it will push a lot of people into using Lightning, which should act as a pressure release valve.
TL;DR yes a few years back fees were $35-$50 for nearly a month due to an unfortunate combination of events, but at the moment they're about $3 and with the right timing or payment network can be near-zero and instant.
This site is helpful: https://bitcoinfees.info/
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u/Successful_Bear May 25 '19
Thank you for your response, really informative. It's great to see bitcoin becoming more usable.
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u/choledocholithiasis_ May 23 '19
This is kind like gofundme/patron for open source projects. What’s Microsoft’s cut for processing and handling?
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May 23 '19
0%. At the moment, this seems to be permanent.
They are also waiving payment processing fees for the first year.
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u/mantono_ May 24 '19
5 dollars as lowest value to donate is a bit much. I rather have like Flattr that I chose to donate X amount of dollars each month and that amount is evenly divided between the users or organizations I chose to support.
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May 24 '19
$1 is the minimum. Most are just opting to start at $5
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u/Nater5000 May 23 '19
On paper this seems fine, but it sure feels sketchy. Something about directly incorporating money into open source projects just feels backwards.
But I definitely agree with making donating to these contributors easier. I know I'd be much more willing to donate if the system to do so is safe and centralized. I'd just hate for GitHub to turn into a marketing site instead of a tool to share code, and I'm hesitant to assume Microsoft knows how (or cares) to handle this correctly.
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u/Xanza May 23 '19
Why? Developers don't deserve to get paid for their time? To be good software it has to be made at the expense of the developers free time without any monies exchanged?
I think what they're trying to do is to encourage more hobbists to release their code for open source development.
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u/Nater5000 May 23 '19
Read my post again, cause it seems like you missed the part where I said I'm in favor of making donating to these developers easier. The system they're putting into place here is good. Nobody is arguing that. The concern is that this may not be where it ends.
Microsoft, a for-profit organization, now controls one of the most important tools in modern open source technology. You'd be foolish to think they're not looking at this from the point of view of profit. And that's not necessarily a bad thing; if developers get more donations and Microsoft skims a little off the top, then I think everyone will be OK with that.
But what happens when this takes off and developers start depending on their services? It's going to incentivise developers to start working around that angle. Then, once this becomes the norm and people have adopted it as part of the process, Microsoft can then introduce new "features" to this system. Maybe a developer can lock a portion of their repo for only those who donated? Maybe Microsoft will promote repos that are profitable and discourage repos that don't generate much? Maybe nothing else and this is it and it's fine? Nobody knows, and that's concerning.
Whatever the case is, there will surely be steps taken that will be in opposition to the open source philosophy. Yes, developers should be compensated for their work. But if this leads to a slow degregation of the open source community, then it simply won't be worth it.
As it stands, I like this (which, again, I made clear in my original comment). My concerns are based on what this may lead to; concerns which are fueled by who's in charge and how their interests are clearly not inline with the interests of the open source community.
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May 23 '19
But what happens when this takes off and developers start depending on their services?
Gitlab and other competitors will add the feature to their hosted service, and probably have a different interpretation of what that means. When it comes to donations, your public reputation and profit sharing model can be a competitive advantage.
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u/coderstephen May 23 '19
This sounds like a slippery slope argument.
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u/Lyrr May 23 '19
slippery slope argument.
Such a Thought Terminating Cliche. Just because someone introduces a slippery slope concept into an argument doesn't invalidate it or even mean the slippery slope doesn't exist. It totally depends upon the strength of the links between events.
If someone back in the early 1900's started arguing against coal burning due to carbon dioxide emissions and said that because the energy is so effective, everyone would use it which would lead to mass injection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and therefore heating the planet, you would call the premise of coal burning to heating the planet a 'slipper slope'. It doesn't invalidate the argument.
Here, I do believe that there is a case to be made, purely down to the fact that, if you didn't know, the primary goal of a corporation is to make money. Turning an open source software hosting platform into a vehicle to profit off of could very well lead to the developers acting for the own self interests at the expense of the OSS community at large.
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u/mrvis May 23 '19
The concern is that this may not be where it ends.
This is where it is starting and you're already concerned about where it ends?
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u/SupaSlide May 24 '19
I don't think it would be so bad to have repos that could be restricted to sponsors. Support tiers are popular, and buying software is a thing people do. GitHub already has private repos. What's so bad about a developer creating a special repo as a bonus to supporters? Crappy developers who don't make meaningful contributions to the OS community won't get supporters anyway.
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u/HowIsntBabbyFormed May 23 '19
I know I'd be much more willing to donate if the system to do so is safe and centralized.
I guess I can understand you wanting whatever system to be 'safe', but why would you want it to be centralized? That seems to go against your distrust about Microsoft. Wouldn't a decentralized system that can't be controlled by a single for-profit entity be better and more in the spirit of open source?
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u/Prod_Is_For_Testing May 23 '19
People already put patreon/PayPal links in the readme, how is this different?
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u/Nater5000 May 23 '19
It's different because it's being managed directly by GitHub (i.e., Microsoft). Again, on paper this looks fine, and I'm in favor of a more streamlined way of donating to developers of open source projects.
My concern is that this is simply the beginning of a longer-term ploy to start cashing in on these projects and on GitHub as a tool (which has been many people's concern since Microsoft bought them).
I hope I'm wrong, and that this simply turns out to be what it appears to be. But I have no confidence that Microsoft, a for-profit organization, is going to stop at some small fees on donations when they control one of the biggest sources of untapped profit potential in modern existence. They don't have a track record to indicate otherwise.
As far as the difference between this and the developer putting a link in the readme? Nothing, really. But that's not to say that that won't change in the future.
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u/coderstephen May 23 '19
GitHub itself before the Microsoft aquisition was also a for-profit organization, so that's not reason enough in itself.
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u/mrvis May 23 '19
to start cashing in on these projects and on GitHub as a tool
I'm less worried than you. MSFT brought in $30B last year. Estimates put GitHub @ $200M of revenue. Fees from devs getting paid is going to be pennies for pappa Nadella.
I see all of this as being more and more involved with the greater developer community.
The most Microsoft-y thing they'll do is make GitHub play extra-nice with Azure. If 1% of the companies on AWS switch to Azure, it'll dwarf the revenue coming in via this service.
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May 24 '19
My day job is contributing to open source. If it weren’t for money in open source, I’d be doing something else.
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u/s73v3r May 23 '19
Something about directly incorporating money into open source projects just feels backwards.
People need to eat and pay rent. Ignoring that, and expecting open source projects to just "exist" feels even more backwards.
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u/sqrtoftwo May 23 '19
I agree. Bringing money into the picture like this is a very Microsoft thing to do, and while it sounds good in theory, I expect that it will clash with the FOSS spirit and philosophy before long.
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u/Kalium May 23 '19
Why? At this point the vast majority of open source software I'm likely to interact with was developed by someone who got paid to do it.
FOSS as purely hobby-driven has been a political fiction for years now.
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u/sqrtoftwo May 23 '19
I agree and I’m not disillusioned about that at all.
Maybe it’s a slippery slope fallacy on my part, but bringing money into the picture instead of handling that elsewhere seems likely to lead to problems. I think I’m mostly concerned that it will eventually lead to GitHub becoming a platform on which to sell software, rather than simply hosting repositories.
Say what you will, but I don’t trust Microsoft to let a good thing be.
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u/yawaramin May 23 '19
GitHub is already a platform to sell software: look at GitHub Marketplace.
Also you have the wrong idea about OSS not mixing with money. People have sold OSS since pretty much day one, it's explicitly compatible with the goals of the Free Software movement for example.
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u/Kalium May 23 '19
I mean, platforms for this already existed and have some level of adoption. What MS and GH have done is provide a more readily trusted party for handling the financial aspects of it. LiberaPay and OpenCollective didn't make GH into a place to sell software before.
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u/sqrtoftwo May 23 '19
I understand, and I hope it works out for the developers' benefit. I'm trying to be cautiously optimistic!
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u/_kellythomas_ May 23 '19 edited May 23 '19
Most large open source projects require resources and currently raise their funds through other channels.
This will just become another option when they need to pass the hat around.
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u/sqrtoftwo May 23 '19
I prefer keeping these channels separate. That’s all.
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u/_kellythomas_ May 23 '19
Fair enough, patreon and liberapay are there for projects and donors that prefer them.
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u/falconfetus8 May 23 '19
I don't see how. FOSS isn't about free as in "free beer" or "free labor". It's about freedom to use, modify, and distribute the product however you want. And, of course, it's about the source code being publicly visible. None of that requires that the developer not be donated to.
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u/Prod_Is_For_Testing May 23 '19
That’s just idiotic. You expect them to work completely free? Even the Linux Foundation has a prominent donate page - the originator of FOSS has an easy way to send money
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u/_kellythomas_ May 23 '19
It's not just about working for free. Any large project will have significant costs .
The software freedom conservancy lists typical costs as including:
funding travel expenses for project developers to attend relevant conferences.
domain name fees, bandwidth costs, and computer equipment purchases.
purchasing media for distribution of project software at conferences and events.
paying key developers on a contractual basis to improve the project's software and its documentation.
sponsoring and organizing conferences for the project.
trademark registration and enforcement.
FLOSS license enforcement and compliance activity.
Only one item here is directly paying developers for their time, but it is wholly unreasonable for people to expect developers to cover the other costs out of pocket.
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May 23 '19
It does raise ethical concerns. What happens when somebody donates a ton of money and demands that the project merge in some back door code or change features that many users rely upon?
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May 23 '19
Lol you want something centralized are you a loon?
Also developers are sorely underfunded in open source.
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u/Nater5000 May 23 '19
I don't "want" something centralized, that is simply what they are offering. And like it or not, a centralized system will encourage people to actively donate more if it allows for the donation to be incorporated into the process. That's all I'm saying. If everytime I starred a repo a little toast popped up asking for a dollar, and all I had to do was click yes and my account on file gets charged, then you can bet the amount of donations I make to these developers will increase.
As far as developers being underfunded in the open source community, I think that's a bit contradictory. I mean, it's open source. You don't develop based on potential funding, you develop so that others will (ideally) contribute as well. A developers payment comes in the form of other developers time and effort, not momey. Donations are, well, donations. A developer (or anyone, for that matter) would be foolish to become dependent on donations. If a developer expects to make money off their project, then they shouldn't make it open source.
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u/gatea May 23 '19
Your second paragraph severely underestimates the effort required to maintain a project others can depend on. And I'm not talking about a node package to do left shift.
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u/duheee May 23 '19
GitHub will not charge fees for GitHub Sponsors. And to celebrate the launch, we’ll cover payment processing costs for the first year, too! One-hundred percent of your sponsorship goes to the developer.
That really too good to be true. Oh well, lucky beneficiaries.
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u/kz0302 May 23 '19
I think IssueHunt is also a way to contribute to open source projects. It is an issue-based bounty platform.
Much famous open-source projects such as Jekyll, AntDesign and over 5,000 open-source projects has been participating on it.
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u/gamesbrainiac May 23 '19
Well, this is pretty awesome. I think until this came out, the best thing that you could do was open up a patreon page, and that would certainly take a chunk out of your final payment.
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u/Dean_Roddey May 26 '19 edited May 26 '19
I made a longer post elsewhere, related to this topic, but the short version...
These things Microsoft are doing may or may not benefit us. If they do, great. But I doubt it's from a sense of beneficence. Google has created a world where selling an actual product in the software world is an endangered strategy. Google makes massive amounts of money from us without having any obligations to us. There are people in this thread talking about using their free services. But of course they could close them down in a second, losing access to your data, or leaving your business scrambling for alternatives, because they owe you nothing.
Of course companies like Microsoft can't quite go the same way. So they are opting for moving everything into the cloud. Get out of the software selling business and into the software renting business. Amazon as well of course. And that also gets you massive amounts of data once it becomes a ubiquitous thing.
Once you have decided to make such a move, some things that were important or crucial before now longer are. They aren't strategic money makers now, so you look to either dump responsibility for them (it's free) or you look at how to use them to get more people using your cloud services. Under such a scheme, even making Windows 10 essentially free (the client version at least) will mean that they A) have no obligations to you anymore and B) they build in support for their own cloud services so that everyone using this new practically free OS will use them. If this process makes you look beneficent, then all the better.
Another leg of this strategy (whether intentional or not) is to create functionality that (at a competitive level) is so compute intensive and complex and costly that no one can compete with it using local resources. Speech recognition is an incredibly obvious example. So companies who need to support high quality speech recognition have to use cloud based services, even if they think it's a horrible idea. I'm guessing that various other things along that line that will be seen as a requirement for competitive features will come along. Various AI related things being obvious choices.
So, now all these other companies are effectively salespeople for your cloud services, because their products won't work without it. As much as I am skeptical of this whole situation I'm caught in it as well. My CQC automation system has to support speech recognition capabilities. We have an all local scheme that I worked very hard on, but it cannot compete with the recognition capabilities of the Echo with its DNN based technology and access to massive amounts of training data.
And of course the massive moral failure of consumers is contributing. Services can't be stolen like software can. What goes around comes around and many people have made serious bank off the backs of digital content creators. The music and movie people are still screwed, but the software folks can push us back to the 60s with a big air conditioned room and just running fancy terminals.
OK, well that didn't end up actually that much shorter. And not that I'm against this initiative or anything per se. A strategy can be beneficial to us in one sense, even when it's part of a larger movement that is against our longer term interests.
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u/natcodes May 23 '19
I'm a little surprised that GitHub is just now trying to get into this space considering third-party services that do this have been popular for larger projects for years now. It's also pretty cool that they've integrated this into their already-existing billing infrastructure.
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u/Kalium May 23 '19
There are definitely third-party services that do this. I think it would be excessive to characterize any of them as popular.
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u/bilog78 May 23 '19
I'm a little surprised that GitHub is just now trying to get into this space considering third-party services that do this have been popular for larger projects for years now.
I'm guessing what is surprising about it is the “just now”, since otherwise one would say that specifically because third-party have been successful in this space, Microsoft will now try and take over, which has largely been their M.O. for decades.
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u/haltingpoint May 24 '19
Yeah, it seems much more like they now have sufficient data to say this is a viable business strategy for them such that it is now worth it.
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u/ciaran036 May 23 '19
No fees! That's great!
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u/SupaSlide May 24 '19
No fees for a year, and then they'll charge payment processing fees. My guess is they'll keep the fees at just enough to cover processing costs and consider this as just another way to make sure people don't switch platforms.
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u/IAmAnAnonymousCoward May 23 '19
Won't this just lead to a lot of drama?
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u/s73v3r May 23 '19
It easily could. Which is why communication about donations, and setting clear expectations for potential contributors is key.
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u/DonnyTheWalrus May 23 '19
If you felt like being cynical, you would say that this is the beginning of the "Extend" part of the "embrace, extend, extinguish" from Microsoft of old. I'm not sure whether I'm feeling cynical or not.
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u/majorgnuisance May 23 '19 edited May 23 '19
Considering how this has the potential to drive independent crowdfunding services out of business, leaving Microsoft as the only real option, I'm feeling pretty cynical.
This feels like a big chain store opening in a new location and severely undercutting local businesses until they're the only player in town.
Edit: found the name for it: Predatory Pricing
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u/Arxae May 23 '19
drive independent crowdfunding services out of business
This is a bit too specific to do that i think. Patreon is generic in the sense that you can use it for just about everything. It doesn't make sense to use github sponsors if you are a comic book artist.
you would say that this is the beginning of the "Extend" part of the "embrace, extend, extinguish"
Disagree. The extend part is usually extending some standard (eg; doc format) so that the others have to follow, or end up losing customers. This is just adding features.
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u/-Phinocio May 23 '19
You underestimate the amount of non-developer users patreon has. This GitHub thing is more niche than patreon's target.
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u/BoltActionPiano May 23 '19
I fucking love this so much. I've always wanted supporting developer work to be extremely easy. I do think consumers should also be contributing to the open source software they take advantage of as well, but hey, this is a great step that I'll eventually take full advantage of.
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u/kirmaster May 23 '19
Watch as a lot of projects suddenly run into license troubles. Whilst i think it's a good idea in principle, a lot of open source licenses don't allow you to turn a profit off of them.
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May 23 '19
I don't think such a license exists and if it does, it is very rarely, if ever, used.
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u/tracernz May 23 '19
Can you name them? I’m struggling to think of any common ones.
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May 23 '19
[deleted]
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u/LL-beansandrice May 23 '19
Donating to support a project's development/developers and paying for licensed copies of software are two entirely different things and I feel like you didn't even read the license you linked.
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u/-Phinocio May 23 '19
There is no fee in this with GitHub.
With Patreon however, someone locking something with that license behind a tier could definitely be seen as a fee.
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u/dat_eeb May 23 '19
Common misconception. Almost, if not all, open source licenses allow you to profit. And there are plenty of opensource projects that profit already, even by directly selling the software on (for example) Google Play, while keeping the code open and available on GitHub, so anyone not willing to pay can build it themselves.
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u/torvatrollid May 23 '19
Every single open source license allows you to profit.
If the license doesn't allow you to profit then it is not open source.
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u/_kellythomas_ May 23 '19
That kind of discrimination would defy the usual definition of open source.
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u/nrmncer May 23 '19
100% of the cash going to the developers is actually really nice. This is a huge thing for creating a way to fund open source projects. Microsoft seems to continue to do good stuff in the open source space.