> the ONLY way this ever takes off is if Github does it.
Yes, let's encourage another walled-garden controlled by a dominant player which would be benefiting from FOSS donations (keeping % of it) while doing nothing to make GitHub a FOSS platform at the same time.
First, they don't even cover the cost of their credit card processing. They even used to match donations up to $5000. This is clearly not a profit center for them.
What it is, actually, is excellent long-term business sense. They know that maintaining open source is draining, often thankless and demoralizing. Making sure that their best assets are provided for is just smart.
But also, your attitude is wishful thinking, like Linux on grandma's desktop. And are you seriously implying that Github isn't a FOSS platform? That seems intellectually dishonest at this stage.
My grandma runs Linux on her desktop (I set her up with Fedora).
GitHub hosts lots of FLOSS, of course. The platform itself is fully proprietary, although apparently they plan to liberate some amount of the core. That's why snowdrift.coop choose gitlab.com, although even that's a compromise (we used to use their githost.io offering so we could stay on gitlab CE, but that service closed down and we had to weigh staying on fully-FLO tools vs network effects).
I just met a grandma that runs Linux. That surprised me. But it goes to show that sometimes wishful thinking can be achieved.
If we make something as a community that can replace GitHub in convenience and spread awareness of the problems with GitHub being our main code hosting platform, we may be able to convince the wider community to use a platform for FOSS that is itself FOSS (which is what I believe ekianjo was talking about).
I mean, if GitLab and the rest of the also-rans can't make a dent in Github's market share, I don't understand where you think this market disrupter is going to emerge from unless there's a grand migration to something Next that Github inexplicably is not able to adapt to.
Yes, let's encourage another walled-garden controlled by a dominant player which would be benefiting from FOSS donations (keeping % of it) while doing nothing to make GitHub a FOSS platform at the same time.