I got $550 from this yesterday (as did a few others I asked, so I think the dollar amount was the same for everyone).
Not life changing but certainly always a nice way to start the day, with some unexpected $$.
Not life changing but certainly always a nice way to start the day, with some unexpected $$.
I guess I have a bunch of repos with lots of stars, but equally very few actual real users. But nothing that seems significantly "special" enough to make me a top user, and nothing that I'd expect github themselves are using, even indirectly.
Weird. But nice.
I've been signed up for sponsors for a year or so, because people keep saying it's a good thing. In all that time I had one guy sponsor me for a few months, then stop. A nice experience, but at the same time I guess you have to be extremely lucky, prolific, or shamefully promoting yourself to actual get enough income to live on.
I expect that user facing programs are more likely to succeed than libraries.
The impact is going to differ per country. For example, 550 USD might not be much for an average American programmer but for an average Ukrainian or Indian (the latter has a heart connected to) its a whole lot more. I also suppose Russian devs are out of luck.
I mean, of course MS is not donating out of pure altruism. But so what?
The topic of FOSS funding is quite large and actually something where I'm surprised there's not more consulting around.
You have government grants. You have university employees. You have company employees of which Google and, indeed, Microsoft have many working solely on open source. You have open core companies (Elastic, Scylla, data bricks, ...). You have self funding and Patreon (not usually sustainable). You have funding via FOSS organizations (python, rust foundation, ...).
Did you not know about all these?
Does the money come with any strings attached? Are they blocking other companies from pitching in?
Your issue is with the amount they are giving, not with the fact that they giving. The way to fix this is not by saying "this is so little, just shove it", the way to fix this is by getting other companies (regardless of their size) to contribute as well.
> The topic of FOSS funding is quite large and actually something where I'm surprised there's not more consulting around.
Yes, that I completely agree. I am still puzzled at a recent conversation I had here on HN with a self-professed "tech strategy advisor for PE firms" who simply could not understand the possible benefits in looking at the services that a company depends on and in funding open source alternatives.
No, my issues are manifold. With the slice of conversation I'm having with you, the issue I am stressing here is that a one off payment of 500 USD is not "funding" in the sense that someone can quite their job or even go to a 4 day week and shore up their finances with it. It's a one off.
You also mentioned the FOSS Foundations, like the PSF. Where do you think that their money comes from? I have $25/month sent their way to support the JazzBand devs. Do you think that I should stop my contribution just because it is so small in the grand scheme of things?
Of course no one is going to quit their jobs over one company giving $500/year. But I'm failing to see how this is an issue. It's not like MS / Github are announcing they are going to hire all the FOSS devs from all projects they depend on. They just gave some money. Instead of looking at this and thinking "this is BS", why can't we look at this and think "Oh, nice! If even shitty companies like MS are starting to help, how can we get the better ones to do it too?"
So its either small community hosting like Codeberg.org or independent hosting, which both hurt a projects discoverability and ease to contribute.
Is ActivityPub / decentralization viable for git though?
Also Gitea still lacks a Decent CI/CD integration/workflow, GitHub Actions and Gitlab CI/CD are much better than the Drone/Woodpecker + Gitea workflow.
It's not a popularity contest.
I think that the lock-in from github are in the other parts of the system: the CI, issue tracking, comment section, etc. This is what "forces" most people to have accounts there if they want to collaborate.
With federation this would be solved, but the issue is that GitHub probably won't support federation.
If I understood the idea of the people working on forgefed, this is not true. It's quite possible that issues/discussions and even code reviews to happen over activitypub.
> GitHub probably won't support federation
They still have an usable API, so even if they don't support it federation officially, it will be possible to implement, e.g, a bridge bot that reads/writes from your AP server to the GitHub projects that you need to interact with.
https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/join/
You're joking right? If this is complex then I guess you've never signed a CLA for apache or any other project?
Also you don't have to email anyone to renew anything(2) And the project can seek profit too, so compared to GitHub, its a hassel.
1. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati...
2.https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati...
Yet it is the only real solution to not have a megacroporation control the public square for open source development. I hope that efforts to federate source forges succeed because moving to the next hosted forge with generous plans for open source developers is only a temporary solution until the owners decide that they need a return on their investment.