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Re:GitHub Sponsors by diggan on Thursday May 23, 2019 @06:22AM (#19990308)
I'm complaining about that this feature is not trying to improve the ecosystem long-term for open source developers.

It's great that you can now have a fancier link to OpenCollective. Thank you for that, Githubbers who are reading the HN comments. But it feels like smoke-and-mirrors.

The real announcement is the other, built-in funding platform they built. Which, if they wanted to, could have been built entirely on something open, instead of their own stuff. There is no special features that for example OpenCollective does not already have.

Instead they (not surprisingly) continue to walk down the path of closed platforms, while cheering for open source.

Re:GitHub Sponsors by Kalium on Thursday May 23, 2019 @06:28AM (#19990335)
> It's great that you can now have a fancier link to OpenCollective. Thank you for that, Githubbers who are reading the HN comments.

It improves discoverability, which is important enough that it's a big part of why people use GitHub. It might just be me, but that seems like it might benefit open source developers no matter what platform they use.

Re:GitHub Sponsors by diggan on Thursday May 23, 2019 @06:32AM (#19990362)
In the short-term, I think a lot of open source developers will get funding, who might not have gotten it otherwise. But I'm not too optimistic of a future where GitHub, as a closed platform, basically owns open source.

Copying from another comment I made:

> But with the new owner who sees GitHub as a way to get marketshare of developers, and not as it's own entity, it's hard to continue to cheer on them. When Microsoft have to either increase profits/decrease expenses and they choose between Azure and GitHub, I'm pretty sure the effort will either be to decrease the expenses of GitHub, or increase the profits of Azure. None of those two ways are good for the users of GitHub in the long-term.