A lot of people who work on open source software get paid to do so. Many others do not. And as we learned during the Heartbleed aftermath, sometimes the unpaid (or under-paid) projects are very important. Projects have changed their licenses (e.g. MongoDB, which is now not an open source project by the Open Source Initiative’s definition) in order to cut off large corporations that don’t pay for the free software.

There’s clearly a broad recognition that maintainers need to be paid in order to sustain the software ecosystem. So if you expect that people are happy with GitHub’s recent announcement of a GitHub Sponsors, you have clearly spent no time in open source software communities. The reaction has had a lot of “pay the maintainers! No, not like that!” which strikes me as being obnoxious and unhelpful.

GitHub Sponsors is not a perfect model. Bradley Kuhn and Karen Sandler of the Software Freedom Conservancy called it a “quick fix to sustainability“. That’s the most valid criticism. It turns out that money doesn’t solve everything. Throwing money at a project can sometimes add to the burden, not lessen it. Money adds a lot of messiness and overhead to manage it, especially if there’s not a legal entity behind the project. That’s where the services provided by fiscal sponsor organizations like Conservancy come in.

But throwing money at a problem can sometimes help it. Projects can opt in to accepting money, which means they can avoid the problems if they want. On the other hand, if they want to take in money, GitHub just made it pretty easy. The patronage model has worked well for artists, it could also work for coders.

The other big criticism that I’ll accept is that it puts the onus on individual sponsorships (indeed, that’s the only kind available at the moment), not on corporate:

Like with climate change or reducing plastic waste, the individual’s actions are insignificant compared to the effects of corporate action. But that doesn’t mean individual action is bad. If iterative development is good for software, then why not iterate on how we support the software? GitHub just reduced the friction of supporting open source developers significantly. Let’s start there and fix the system as we go.