First off, thanks so so much for engaging. Truly grateful <3
From the FAQ[1]:
> 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
And yes, money feels nice. But there are politics here that are real. The meaning of a sum of money is also wrapped up in the future that it creates. Decision-makers at GitHub aren't stupid, and so the future their money creates should be assumed to be the one they intended.
If someone comes into a town with boatloads of outsider money, and set up shop next door to a critical local business, but selling at loss leader rates that burn money, with plans to bump up prices once the locals flail and weaken -- that's understood as anti-social and kinda asshole behaviour.
It feels no different here. We shouldn't be applauding, despite the good deal.
Money ain't free. We're being paid off to accept a future of collapsed possibilities.
> Decision-makers at GitHub aren't stupid, and so the future their money creates should be assumed to be the one they intended.
This is always true, for any person or organization at any level of scale. They spend money to bend the world in the direction they want.
This is not a instrinsically bad thing. It's only a priori bad if you assume the world is zero sum and any change to benefit party A is necessarily a harm to all other parties.
I think you have to have a little more sophisticated analysis to see if something a business does is a net good or ill to the world. When I buy cookies, I acknowledge that I'm helping create a world where more cookies are bought and consumed. But I'm pretty on board with that world too, so that's OK.
In this case, I don't think anyone can accurately predict the large scale consequences of what GitHub is doing.
Thanks for the generous thoughts :) I know it's not intrinsically bad. But I suppose I am saying that this specific event is bad, in non-shallow analysis.
Yes, all things are aspiring to "bend the world" (i like that term) -- a kid putting up a poster for selling cookies from their pantry for 10c is trying to affect people.
But then there's greater bending, of almost all possible paths of significance. GitHub/GitLab are THE places in our digital lives as coders. The scale at which this intervention/distortion is happening is important.
The unfair squelching of funding experiments in open source land WILL affect paths outside software. OpenCollective was using their learnings and profits in serving FOSS, to affect non-digital projects in the social fabric of physical cities: https://opencollective.com/brussels
This unfair buying of the opportunity space -- afforded only by deep pockets of Microsoft -- will affects paths that were leading to much more collateral benefit for all of us. Most maintainers would need to be irrational to use anything BUT their system while the distortions are in place. Those supporting this launch bear some real responsibility for what becomes LESS possible in the world when this feature "takes the ball and goes home". (at least in terms of open source funding)
I truly don't feel I'm doing a shallow analysis here.
Anyhow, I really appreciate the attention you may have given this.
Disclaimer: I work adjacent to civic technology, government procurement and the distributed web. There are many exciting paths dancing around these things, and the execution of this launch (separate from the feature itself) is certainly not one of them imho
Ah I see, so if I understand correctly, it's more that you feel there is ill-intent behind Gihtub's move and their plan is to undercut existing players, and then to increase prices?
That feels to me, like one interpretation for sure, but there are others.
MS (like some other large tech. companies) make their money these days more from subscription services to cloud hosted systems.
Github feels, to me, like a play to provide a compelling ecosystem for developers, in the hopes that it translates to revenue from cloud.
Doing as you describe (upping charges on a service after getting rid of the competition) seems like it would backfire horribly on them from a PR perspective and the amount of money involved (a small percentage of the donations provided) would be a rounding error on Microsoft's income.
I think there's an ulterior motive, for sure, but the one I see as more likely is providing more stickiness to the MS developer ecosystem in efforts to translate to more ammunition in the cloud war with Google and Amazon...
From the FAQ[1]:
> 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
https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-github-sponsors#ab...
And yes, money feels nice. But there are politics here that are real. The meaning of a sum of money is also wrapped up in the future that it creates. Decision-makers at GitHub aren't stupid, and so the future their money creates should be assumed to be the one they intended.
If someone comes into a town with boatloads of outsider money, and set up shop next door to a critical local business, but selling at loss leader rates that burn money, with plans to bump up prices once the locals flail and weaken -- that's understood as anti-social and kinda asshole behaviour.
It feels no different here. We shouldn't be applauding, despite the good deal.
Money ain't free. We're being paid off to accept a future of collapsed possibilities.
imho of course :)