Announcing GitHub Sponsorship Matching for Uno Platform Contributors and Employees

[sasakrsmanovic]

For many open-source maintainers, their project is a labor of love. At the same time, we hear increased “cries for help” from maintainers in the .NET ecosystem who believe their work is being abused.

This is a complex problem that has existed for a long time. Likely there isn’t a silver bullet to solve it. For Uno Platform itself, we have built financial sustainability from the start with our enterprise support program, which is powering us to run a 20-person full-time team. We encourage all those starting an open-source project to think about long-term sustainability right from the start.

But to help the current situation with underfunded maintainers, today we are launching a program for sponsorship-matching to all our employees and Uno Platform GitHub contributors who have contributed to our repo in the past year.

This is similar to how retirement savings are matched in some countries. Harvard Business Review quotes a study that found a participation increase of up to 10% participation if the company is contribution-matching. The matching program puts the ‘ball in individual developer/employee’ court and doesn’t solve the challenge of big profitable corporations using underfunded OSS work. As we said, there is no silver bullet for this big problem, and we hope that this program is a step in the right direction.

Process For Getting Your Contribution Matched:
We are going to approach this just as a startup would, and we will not over-engineer the process. If you are an Uno Platform employee or unoplatform/uno Github project Contributor, to claim contribution matching simply:

1. Sponsor the open-source project or maintainer on GitHub.
2. Forward the contribution confirmation email to info@platform.uno OR download and send us the invoice from your GitHub profile billing history.
3. We will sponsor the same project or maintainer and forward our contribution confirmation to you.

General Guidelines:

• OSS projects should be in the .NET space, regardless of being part of the .NET foundation or not.
• OSS projects with commercial licenses (dual licenses) cannot be sponsored.
• Own projects cannot be sponsored.

As you can see, we are trying to keep it simple and fair to ensure the funds go towards those maintainers in biggest need. We will monitor the program and reserve the right to adjust these guidelines to prevent abuse.

There is a cap to the program, which will grow as we grow in the future. In talking to maintainers, we’ve discovered that typical individual contributions are (far) less than $100, so we are budgeting according to that. If you would like to check if there is still room in the GitHub sponsorship matching budget ahead of donating, please email us at info@platform.uno, and we will get back to you. We are starting with a fairly open checkbook to see just how popular or not this program will be. Based on community pick-up, we will decide about the annual cap and any other rules that need to be established, which we will publish accordingly.

In addition to this contribution program, we will continue sponsoring OSS projects and maintainers as we have done in the past.

Uno Platform Team