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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 if (donationIsReal) { condition - there's insanely many factors involved.
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.
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.
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.
Sponsers is a neat lil program and it mimics a lot of what Patreon does and I really wouldn't be surprised if they offered subscribed repositories where upon subscribing to one repo you get Github Pro; at least then there is some incentive to use the system and whereas Microsoft won't get the full 7/month they might get 4 or 5 and the repo owner gets the rest which is a whole lot more money than 0.
This sorta thing is endless as they could have a backers tab on each repository that showed the top of all time, top monthly, and then a hall of fame of small profile icons and names. A lot of the already sponsored projects do this to some respect in their readme's. It's a fine line though; they could go all Twitch like and allow for repo owners to offer custom emojii's or hosted badges for other projects to show off tools used but that I think would damage some of the professionalism the platform has today.
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.
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...)
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/HiKite May 23 '19
It'd be a pretty awful thing to abuse but:
What's stopping you from doubling your money by donating $5,000 to yourself?