wow, love it. Look forward to seeing it rolled out - it looks like you can only sponsor individuals for now, would be great to be able to sponsor projects
it looks like you can only sponsor individuals for now
I wonder if that will create some perverse incentives? Will people be as willing to contribute significantly to projects if they know the maintainer is making $1000s and they're getting nothing. Or will they instead rather try to start their own competing project in hopes of capturing some of that revenue.
it does actually look like you can sponsor projects too already, but the payments are not handled by github in those instances, it just links off to another patreon style provider - for example https://github.com/react-spring/react-spring.
I think managing the direction and budgets of open source projects that have many contributors in a fair, effective way is a really interesting problem. There are some blockchain DAO projects where this is handled by voting. Each participant's vote could be weighted by different things - contribution activity, seniority within the project, more traditional board/council structure, whatever. The voting results can also be automatically executed.
Or you could pre-determine and automate how funds will be paid out to contributors - ie. bounties for new features/fixing bugs
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18637344/github-sponsors-...