GitHub Sponsors will probably work pretty well for better-developed Developers, Teams and established Projects. It looks like part of an plan to draw-in more-successful initiatives and use them to buff the image & status of the organizing entity (GitHub, and Microsoft). Actually, GitHub was doing this, and creating features to achieve the same goals, before the buyout.

The cost here, both with the old GitHub and with the Sponsors facility, is that it is not as effective with/for the ‘less-developed’, would-be, wannabe Developer … and the more free-floating creativity they tend to bring to the culture. Instead of chasing something because it’s a keen idea, folks find themselves asking, ‘Will it work on Sponsors’?

Open Source benefits from a relatively larger pool of less-successful and inefficient … dabblers. When this element is thinned/weeded out, and the culture is composed of ‘with-it’ operators competing for slots in a proper ‘orbit’, the value & strength of open source declines.

Make no mistake: what we have watched with the GitHub dynamic, both before and emphatically now after the sale, is very old business strategy & tactics. IBM was doing this in the Mainframe world, when Bill Gates was a tyke. Bill learned his lessons well, and Social Media have adapted the methodologies to their context.

MaBell refined these practices for the emerging Tech/Info world, when our great-grandparents were the with-it crowd. I don’t think it’s evil; we have benefited as a country, in enterprise and technical progress, but this system does not need or want larger numbers of less-accomplished or (thus-far) unproductive participants.

But Open Source, does.