GitHub Sponsors is a new program launched by the popular web-based Git hosting service, to allow anyone to support the open source developers or contributors through a new ‘Sponsor Me‘ button on their repositories to receive funding.
While the ‘Sponsor Me‘ button is available only to the open source developers, there will be no charges by GitHub for supporting the work of the developers, for the first year of participation; GitHub will also cover the payment processing for all the payments made via the platform.
The Microsoft owned web service, GitHub intends to help circulate funding amongst the developers with the new tool by allowing recurring payments to other members of the community, much like a crowdfunding service, and whenever a developer solves issues or answers queries on your repository, you can visit their profile by hovering over their username to make a donation.
GitHub will match up about $5,000 in contributions for each sponsored developer, for the first year, but the company won't be taking any cut of the funds paid out through the service, at least for now.
What this means is that 100% of the sponsorship funds will go to the developer, with GitHub Sponsors payouts spread across every country where the GitHub service is supported.
Albeit, there's likely to be a problem of keeping track of where all the code in a given application comes from, as libraries often rely on others, but GitHub will be adding new features to make it easier to see who contributes to the software, and then be able to sponsor the projects developer.
The company also announced some other new features that will make it easier for developers to keep track of all the open source projects they've contributed or rely on and to be able to incorporate security fixes.
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