Thank you to our maintainers

I got the email on Friday telling me I&#x27;m one of the fortunate few to get $550 and cynically thought that it was some sort of GitHub credit; needless to say that I was pleasantly surprised that it was actual cash!<p>I&#x27;ve been solo maintaining my project since 2008 and average about ~425,000 downloads&#x2F;week per NPM. My sum total of donations prior to GitHub&#x27;s was maybe $5. Making money on a JavaScript library was certainly never my goal but I sincerely appreciate the acknowledgement that my project has worth that someone is willing to pay for.

I&#x27;m really disappointed with the conversation this has provoked. I was a fortunate recipient of this and I am delighted. I&#x27;m pleased about the money, that&#x27;s great. But more than that I was really thrilled to discover that I had indirectly worked on GitHub; because I love GitHub.<p>I feel like I should qualify this further. I actually missed the original email and spent a day or so realising friends and open source colleagues were being recognised, whilst believing my own OSS wasn&#x27;t in the mix. And I was pleased for them.<p>I&#x27;ve been doing OSS for more than a decade. I enjoy it. I wish companies directly supported it, as paying for what you value is responsible and wise. GitHub just did that. Thank you GitHub. I appreciate it. This was a good thing. Well done!

No good deed goes unpunished. They didn’t have to do this, and now that they did, not surprisingly people (who probably aren’t even the recipients) are complaining that the amount is too tiny, the donation isn’t ongoing, etc.<p>Wouldn’t it be nice if the complainers’ employers paid a tiny, one time $550 to open source projects they depend on.

I got $550 from this yesterday (as did a few others I asked, so I think the dollar amount was the same for everyone).<p>Not life changing but certainly always a nice way to start the day, with some unexpected $$.

Did anyone get $500 that didn&#x27;t signup for GitHub&#x27;s payment process or putting their non-standard `.github&#x2F;` folder in your repository? This feels like a FOMO play to get more users to add GitHub mirrors to their project to try to dominate the Code forge space <i>and</i> tangential donations (which is why they did a loss-leading match program in the beta). I&#x27;d rather not prop that up; I&#x27;ll stick to Sourcehut and Codeberg&#x2F;Gitea.

The reason everyone&#x27;s so cynical about this is because Copilot is literally selling this code and it reeks of public relations rather than charity.

I’m of two minds about this:<p>- On the one hand, for GitHub, 500k is nothing, just a PR move. For maintainers, $500 might make the difference between struggling to pay rent and having enough money to leave it in the bank, or having a nice dinner at the end of the month.<p>- On the other hand, for GitHub, 500k is nothing, just a PR move! If they really wanted to show appreciation for the maintainers that power a billion dollar business, more than a drop in the bucket would be great.<p>So, I guess it boils down to: that’s a great start, don’t stop there!

Something about that headline really irks me. I think GitHub is an amazing place for people to share code, I also think it’s really nice of them to do this.<p>But the maintainers aren’t “their” maintainers. They are maintainers using GitHub for their projects.<p>Probably just me overreacting, just thought I’d mention it.

<p><pre><code> &gt; From the U.S. to Japan to Brazil, if you’re one of the people or projects we identified &gt; then you will get a confirmation about the sponsorship before the end of June. </code></pre> How will this work for the Japanese? I&#x27;ve tried donating to Anki, maintained by someone in Japan, and it seems that accepting donations there is so problematic that he actually prefers just not to accept them.

Nice little gem I didn’t know about at the end of the article: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sponsors&#x2F;explore" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sponsors&#x2F;explore</a>

You can tell the people who neither run businesses or are open source maintainers.<p>They are the ones complaining about both GitHub giving money to maintainers and spending money on marketing.<p>To those people: there&#x27;s no harm being done by this and there is good. That&#x27;s how you judge something like this.

There’s something a little creepy about referring to the maintainers as “ours.”

Wondering how they are counting dependencies. GitHub’s current dependency tooling (Dependabit, Dependency Graph) ignores Dockerfiles for eg, and anything installed on the OS level is not easily accounted either.

On the one hand, hooray for half a million dollars for the hardworking folks &quot;down in the trenches&quot; who seldom receive the appreciation or remuneration they so richly deserve. Hoorah!<p>On the other hand, this does nothing for me as a <i>Free</i> software fanatic to make Github and Microsoft any more palatable. I still can&#x27;t believe that a closed, proprietary centralized webapp has so completely co-opted both the git DCVS <i>and</i> FOSS itself. (I&#x27;ve heard people unironically call Github the &quot;flagship of the FOSS movement&quot;.)<p>The image I get is of the boss riding by in a gilded carriage casting handfuls of gold coins to the serfs.<p>Some of the comments here are of the &quot;shut up and be grateful&quot; ilk, and some even try to shame people for not being sufficiently grateful and&#x2F;or uncritical. I call BS on that.<p>If Github&#x2F;MS find themselves in a &quot;damned if you do, damned if you don&#x27;t&quot; situation in re: supporting FOSS maintainers it&#x27;s only because of their own actions and history.<p>If they really wanted to thank FOSS folks they could open source Github, eh? Or Windows.

Does anyone know what `font-feature-settings` does? ProtonMail and GitHub both use this setting and it causes fonts to display weird in Firefox.<p>Examples here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;philliphaydon&#x2F;status&#x2F;1541021821637922816" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;philliphaydon&#x2F;status&#x2F;1541021821637922816</a>

Downvote me to hell, but for-profit companies do not give donations in order to decrease their profit.<p>Microsoft github might be doing this to retain projects that might be switching to non-corporate forges, or appease the concerns around copylot.<p>Or expand &quot;github Sponsors&quot; and achieve even more control over the FOSS community.<p>Beware of strangers bearing gifts.

Hmmm... I never finished updating my Github Sponsor thing, so I&#x27;ve just done that.<p>But as someone that tended to create orgs for projects rather than have it all under a personal account, should I move all of the projects? I guess so, right?<p>What&#x27;s the recommended way to move Go repos without breaking them for all users? (I have low-thousands of stars, but the largest project is used by mid-thousands of projects - so I anticipate breakage for my hopeful $5 one-off solo sponsor).<p>Something like using a vanity import path for all projects? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sagikazarmark.hu&#x2F;blog&#x2F;vanity-import-paths-in-go&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sagikazarmark.hu&#x2F;blog&#x2F;vanity-import-paths-in-go&#x2F;</a>

On the one hand, that&#x27;s the salary of 2-5 engineers. Pure PR. On the other hand, it&#x27;s more than $0.

I lost respect for a lot of you today who had the nerve to suggest that these amounts aren&#x27;t enough money. For the OSS contributions I&#x27;ve made, I&#x27;ve never been given a penny or even so much as a single coffee for the things I&#x27;ve created, but if someone did, it could be a nickel and I&#x27;m not going to say anything but thank you. Nobody owes you anything in this world, and a little grace goes a long way in this industry.<p>For those of you who complained about the money, you people need to reflect on your attitudes and what brought you to this point.<p>Ugly.

Divide et impera!

Is there a list of the recipient projects?

Onion headline: Billionaire pays 500k to charity instead of paying $5 million dollars in tax!<p>Context - Github copilot license violations.

Thanks for training our model folks. We’re gonna charge $10 a month for your work but hey, here’s a one off $550

I think it&#x27;s pretty pathetic some of you are focused on copilot (as if youve never ripped code off SO before). I&#x27;m willing to bet none of you have contributed anything to open source either. Dunning-Kruger effect on full display.<p>To the rest, congratulations and thank you from those of us who thanklessly use your hard work. I hope this kind of public appreciation takes off and we see more large names using this as a template.

I wonder if this is evenly distributed? $500,000 may seem like a lot but that comes out to about $500 per maintainer. This doesn&#x27;t appear to be an ongoing subscription either. I personally would rather Microsoft keep the money and spend it on open sourcing their own products instead of trying to find more ways to exploit others.