Back in November last year, GitHub announced the beta of GitHub Sponsors. Through this new program, anyone can donate funds to support the contributors who build the open-source software we use every day.
Now, GitHub Sponsors has been launched finally and is now available in 32 regions. Until now, the program supported the funding of individual open-source developers. But now you can extend support to teams of developers too, through organization sponsorship.
The best part about Github Sponsors is that it covers payment processing costs too. This means, there is zero platform fee and 100% of the sponsorship goes to the developers or the project.
More than 500 organizations had joined GitHub Sponsors during the beta. Now it has been launched, these numbers are expected to grow even faster in the 32 regions.
With this initiative, organizations will finally be able to connect directly to their users for financial support. These funds can be used in purchasing the hardware needed for maintainers to build and test software. So, now, maintainers of open-source software can spend more time improving software rather than raising funds for it.
India is one of the largest hubs of GitHub users across the world. In fact, Microsoft has even announced a new subsidiary in India. However GitHub Sponsors is not yet available in India and on asking when can we expect it to arrive in the country, here’s the statement we received from a spokesperson:
“Developers in India looking to access the program can still sign up on the waitlist to join the beta. They will also receive news about when GitHub Sponsors is generally available in the country.”
How to join GitHub Sponsors to get funded as an organization?
To help your organization in raising support from the open-source community, follow these steps:
- Teams that have a corporate bank account set up for their open-source organization can visit github.com/sponsors to sign up to become a sponsored organization
- In case your organization doesn’t have a bank account, you can still sign up for the funding with a fiscal host.
GitHub has partnered with Open Collective to make the process easy, but organizations can choose other fiscal hosts too such as NumFOCUS or the Software Freedom Conservancy. For more information on the same, you can refer here.
