Developers aren't born rich, and many of them are working for a living.
Open source software is essential in pushing the technology industry forward. However, many people behind those open-source projects creating open source code isn’t exactly aren't benefiting great deals of profits. This has forced many to turn into other funding platforms to raise money for their work.
GitHub is one of the largest respositories for hosting open source software. And here, it has added GitHub Sponsors, which allows people to financially fund and support the developers of their choice through recurring monthly payments.
By integrating this option right into GitHub, it makes it a lot more easy for those developers.
Initially introduced as beta, GitHub Sponsors simply allows people to sponsor the work of developers and content creators by paying them in the form of donations.
"We're launching GitHub Sponsors in beta with a simple feature set so that we can incorporate community feedback as we scale the program," said GitHub
For developers who just love to hang out on GitHub, they should see Sponsors as a value added to help contributors like themselves, to get the resources they need. But most importantly, this is to also recognize them for their work, and to make the open-source ecosystem a lot better for everyone.
With GitHub adding Sponsors, developers will be able to highlight a “Sponsor” button in their GitHub profiles and repositories.
Those who want to sponsor, should first sign up for a GitHub account. And those who have sponsored developers and projects, will have a 'Sponsoring' icon shown on their profiles.
For sponsors, "You can choose from multiple sponsorship tiers, with monthly payment amounts and benefits that are set by the sponsored developer," explained GitHub.
"Your sponsorship will share your account's existing billing date, payment method, and receipt."
"With Sponsors, any GitHub user can sponsor any open source developer in the program."
To make things easier for both parties to adopt the initiative, GitHub makes it easy for developers to highlight popular funding models, including Open Collective, Community Bridge, Tidelift, Ko-fi, and Patreon; and custom links to alternative funding models by adding a simple configuration file to their repositories.
To make this offer even more alluring, the Microsoft-owned company is matching sponsorship payments up to $5,000 per developer in the first year, and promises to not take any transaction fees for sponsors.
"In the first year, GitHub will not charge any fees, so 100% of sponsorships will go to the sponsored developer. In the future, we may charge a nominal processing fee," said GitHub.
The move comes at a time when Microsoft is focusing more on cloud computing, and has continued its push into the open source world, turning the company into one of the world’s most valuable company.
"GitHub Sponsors is launching small and simple, but our mission is vast: to expand the opportunities to participate in and build on open source," the company explained in a blog post.
"We’re here to serve the developer community, and we’re eagerly listening for your input about what else you’d like to see in GitHub Sponsors."