GitHub Now Lets You Financially Support Contributors, Introduces New Enterprise Features

GitHub is announcing a bunch of new features on its platform. The company is introducing a new way of letting users support contributors and creators on the platform, as well as new security features, and enterprise features.

GitHub Sponsors is a new feature GitHub is testing to help people support open-source creators financially. The idea is that instead of using services like Patreon, you will be able to directly support someone’s work through GitHub. For the first year, GitHub won’t charge any fees for these payments — so the creators you sponsor will get 100% of the money. The new feature is being tested with a small group of users, and you can sign-up to join the waitlist for when it opens up to more people.

GitHub is also acquiring security bot Dependabot that can automatically detect security vulnerabilities on GitHub repositories and automatically take actions against them to help mitigate the potential vulnerabilities. GitHub is also broadening the coverage of its security vulnerabilities with a new partnership with WhtieSoiurce data. It’s even introducing new tools that will allow developers to get better insights into the dependencies on their projects.

And lastly, for its enterprise customers, GitHub is introducing new Enterprise accounts that make it easier for companies to work together. It’s also introducing new roles and permissions, team sync for different groups, Internal repositories that are only visible to members of a company, new Organizational Insights, the ability to draft pull requests, and a new status feature that lets other on your team know when you are available, or when you are just on a night out.