tl;dr: You can now sponsor my open source development work via GitHub Sponsors.
GitHub Sponsors is the latest foray into building a more sustainable future for open source software development. There have been many attempts before, a few of which I tried (Gratipay, Patreon, etc.), but most of them never reached a critical mass, and at most you'd end up getting maybe $20-50/month out of the platform. Another prolific open source contributor I've long followed wrote about the topic of open source support and developer burnout in a post this year, Webform, Drupal, and Open Source...Where are we going?.
For a job (software development) where that's what someone makes in one hour, it's not worth putting in the hours to try to promote ongoing sponsorship when you'd get back only a few hours' worth of pay in a year. I also don't have an explicit goal of monetizing my work, so I often feel guilty even asking about monetary support. On the flip side, I would be more likely to persist through some of the stress of maintainership if I knew it was helping support my growing family.
I have long been involved in the Drupal and Ansible communities, and have submitted PRs, documentation fixes, and code reviews to hundreds of open source projects my work has touched. And if I could find a way to sustain some of my financial needs through open source work, I'd love to devote more time to:
- Maintaining and improving Drupal VM, and modules like Honeypot (both of which are still seeing increased usage, but have been more or less in maintenance mode of late).
- Improving my suite of Ansible roles, and building new Collections, to help solve many automation pain points I've encountered with Kubernetes, Drupal, PHP, and other applications.
- Continuing revisions of my book Ansible for DevOps for another four years (at least!).
- Attending more Drupal events in person (I've had to skip most of the camps I could've attended this year since I'm no longer sponsored by a particularly-large Drupal company).
I've had a Patreon account for some time, and it's good enough for a fast food meal or two every month, but I think Patreon is geared more towards the 'creative' community (YouTubers, podcasting, art, etc.). Maybe GitHub Sponsors will do better for open source contributors... and maybe not.
I'd be humbled and grateful if you could support me (geerlingguy) on GitHub Sponsors.