We do support ACH transfer and wire transfer (as noted in the documentation) for developers with bank accounts in countries that are still in the limited beta. In the coming months, we'll be expanding general availability for more countries on a rolling basis. I'll look into clarifying that in the help docs too.
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 devonzuegel@github.com as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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?
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?
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?
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!
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 ?)
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.
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.
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.
> The only question I have is how easy it would be for those who don’t use Github to subscribe to a recurring donation?
Thanks for the question buro9! All it takes to become a sponsor is an email address and payment method. Our goal is to make sponsorships as friction-free as possible.
Re: individual/repo/org question, GitHub Sponsors is launching small and simple, and as we learn from the initial beta program, we’ll look to expand the ways to participate. One thing we’ve done is put together an advisory panel of open source teams to better understand their unique needs. We’d love to have your voice on the panel, if you’re interested! Send me an email -- devonzuegel@github.com.
Hi! Thanks for clarifying this for everyone. Yes, we just migrated the blog, so both `github.blog` and `blog.github.com` work.
(I'm the open source PM at GitHub, for context... and yes I realize that's not directly verifiable from my sn here so feel free to tweet at me if you want to check: http://twitter.com/devonzuegel)
Hey, that reminds me about Keybase. It's not talked about that much anymore, as far as I can see, but it's nice how it lets you verify your identity across different sites.
Yes! My interest in cities originated from a biography on Robert Moses, and in my quest to learn more I quickly fell into the works of Jane Jacobs. Her ideas are foundational to the way I think about urban planning.
I've read excerpts of "Seeing Like a State", but not the whole thing – thanks for the reminder! I should go back and read through it further.
The superblocks project is fascinating. I'm excited to see how that pans out. Hopefully I can get myself over to Barcelona to see it in person some time soon. :)
We do support ACH transfer and wire transfer (as noted in the documentation) for developers with bank accounts in countries that are still in the limited beta. In the coming months, we'll be expanding general availability for more countries on a rolling basis. I'll look into clarifying that in the help docs too.