And yet the open alternatives don’t seem to have amounted to anyone making a living from open source. Centralizing it offers a nicer UX - it’s not just about feature parity.
Doing this took ten years of operating as a commercial entity earning respect, and then ramping up my productivity hugely to compensate for earning about a quarter what I'd be making as a commercial entity. On the other hand, it's predictable and steady, whereas operating as the commercial entity proved wildly unpredictable and stressful in a whole different, darker way.
UX is fine but the platform will never give people a survivable income by itself. You need to build a business like any other, and then be able to take a MASSIVE hit to your income for the sake of your principles.
I'm happy with my choices but other people really can't do likewise. Certainly not from scratch: you wouldn't gain enough traction. I work in the music business. There's a saying, how do you earn a million dollars running a recording studio? Start with ten million. It's a lot like that, and no payment platform is really going to help.
So, for me that indicates that the problem is not that there is any service for making payments, but rather that open source developers who lives on donations, needs to be paid more by more people.
It would be cool if GitHub integrated with existing platforms and helped that to happen. Instead, they signal nothing about this problem and shipped yet-another platform.
They could have easily have contributed to solving the problem for real, but instead go their own way.
From GH’s perspective, why would they create a dependency on an open service (that could disappear at any moment) when they could roll their own? Especially with all the trust issues that come around payments.
Are there any guarantees that Liberapay could even handle an integration at GH scale without it falling over? They opened 900 accounts last month.
GitHub’s promise is something akin to ‘it just works’ - which means that they take care of this stuff rather than give you yet another tool to integrate with.
GH can’t win in this scenario with some people. GH invest in Liberapay, give it a coat of paint, these same people will then complain that Liberapay has ‘sold out’ / gone ‘too enterprise’ (see Chef, Docker) (or the Microsoft variant - Oh noes, MSFT is working with open source tech it must be EEE) and demand that GH integrate with the next half-baked service with a Bootstrap website.
> why would they create a dependency on an open service (that could disappear at any moment) when they could roll their own?
Because by creating the dependency on an open service and collaborating with them, they help them survive long term and to not disappear at any moment.
Yes, it's nice that "it just works" but sometimes the easiest way of doing something doesn't mean it's the right way. Especially when it comes to hard things like "How do we ensure open source developers can get paid?"
Having worked with human beings before, I would say that it is considerably easier and more predictable if you just do some things yourself.
Working with folks outside of your employ (even if you pay them good money to do the work) will fail you far more often than working with one or more of your own employees.
I can't blame GitHub for doing this completely in-house.
Sure, the easy way is easier. But more often than not, the easiest way is not the best way for the entire ecosystem.
Rather than saying "How can we get money moving around on our platform as soon as possible?" they should have asked "How can we make open source work sustainable?".
But who can blame them really, it's a for-profit and closed source company on every level.
> It would be cool if GitHub integrated with existing platforms and helped that to happen
They did that as well today today with support for a .github/FUNDING.yml. This file lets people provide links to Open Collective, Patreon, Community Bridge, Tidelift, Ko-Fi, a custom link and they show up as alternative sponsoring options for a repo: https://github.blog/2019-05-23-announcing-github-sponsors-a-....
