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Sponsor your favorite open source contributors directly on GitHub  ↦

logged by jerodsanto 2019-05-23T13:32:58Z #github +1

HUGE news coming from GitHub today:

We’re thrilled to announce the beta of GitHub Sponsors, a new way to financially support the developers who build the open source software you use every day. Open source developers build tools for the rest of us. GitHub Sponsors is a new tool to help them succeed, too.

100% of sponsorship money goes to the developers and they’re even matching contributions up to $5k during a developer’s first year! Also, the whole thing is tightly integrated in to GitHub itself:

Open source projects can also express their funding models directly from their repositories. When .github/FUNDING.yml is added to a project’s master branch, a new “Sponsor” button will appear at the top of the repository. Clicking the button opens a natively rendered view of the funding models listed in that file.

There’s lots to digest here, but at first glance this looks like an amazing addition to the open source ecosystem. 🎉

Discussion

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Jerod Santo

Jerod Santo

Omaha, Nebraska

Jerod co-hosts The Changelog, crashes JS Party, and takes out the trash (his old code) once in awhile.

2019-05-23T14:06:58Z ago

A few other tidbits I’ve learned as I toy around with the current offering:

  1. There’s a waitlist to become eligible for sponsorship, but you can start sponsoring today
  2. In case it’s not obvious, you sponsor people not projects
  3. Sponsorships are recurring and amount options are configured by the recipient
  4. The sponsorship page is akin to Patreon. Here’s Sindre Sorhus’ for example
  5. There doesn’t appear to be a way to see how much a contributor is receiving per month
Derek Prior

Derek Prior

2019-05-23T14:52:25Z ago

Hi Jerod! I’m the Engineering Manager for the team that built GitHub sponsors. While it’s true that sponsorships are of a single person, we also launched support for projects to declare funding sources in a first class way on their repository. GitHub Sponsors links are supported here but so are links to Open Collective, Tide Lift, Patreon, and others. See https://help.github.com/en/articles/displaying-a-sponsor-button-in-your-repository

One thing we want people to take away from this is that Sponsors as it exists today is our first step and certainly not our last! We’ve loved reading all of the community feedback. Keep it coming!

Jerod Santo

Jerod Santo

Omaha, Nebraska

Jerod co-hosts The Changelog, crashes JS Party, and takes out the trash (his old code) once in awhile.

2019-05-23T14:45:41Z ago

Meanwhile, on Twitter…

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