A new tool called Sponsors was recently launched by GitHub that allows developers to offer financial support to developers through monthly payments. In addition, developers will be able to choose whether to include a “Sponsor me” button on their GitHub repositories and will be able to highlight their funding models, whether it is individual contributions to developers or using Patreon, Tidelift, Ko-fi or Open Collective.
According to GitHub, tool was created to offer more opportunities to participate in open source projects.
However, this move seems a bit controversial, as it may lead open source developers to focus on projects that are more likely to attract financial contributions and leave aside other projects that are more interesting but not likely to find financial backers on GitHub.
GitHub says developers will be able to create multiple sponsorship tiers with benefits they can define. The funding will be available in every country where GitHub itself operates.
It's worth noting that the Sponsors tool isn't just for code and developers, but for all open source contributors. As long as they have a GitHub profile, everyone will be available for support.
To achieve this task, GitHub is also launching the “Community Contributors” tab to highlight people who created code that your applications rely on, for example.
But in addition to Sponsors, GitHub is also launching a number of new security features. The company announced that it has acquired Dependabot, a tool that ensures projects are using the most up-to-date libraries. GitHub Enterprise is getting improved auditing features, which are now generally available, and admins will now have beta access to a private space on GitHub to discuss potential security issues so that their public conversations aren’t monitored by hackers. GitHub is also launching document scanning, to prevent any leaks of developer credentials from services like Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Mailgun, Slack, Stripe, and Twilio.
The enterprise version of GitHub is also getting some updates, including more granular permissions, which are now available to everyone.
