GitHub is announcing a new way for businesses to invest in open-source alongside other features on day one of its virtual Universe conference.
Businesses will now be able to show their support and appreciation for their favourite open-source projects via ‘GitHub Sponsors for Companies’.
The new feature enables companies to invest in open-source projects using their existing GitHub billing arrangements. Several high-profile businesses – including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, American Express, Daimler, Stripe, and others – have committed to supporting the venture and investing in projects which are generally helping their efforts.
Mike Fix, OSS lead & Software Engineer at Stripe, commented:
“At Stripe, open source is not only a way for us to connect with our developer community, but it is an integral component of our software supply chain.
Open-source provides distribution that meets our users where they are and extends our platform to its fullest potential.
GitHub enables us to invest in projects that tangibly help our users, so we’re thrilled to be a partner in this effort.”
GitHub has also made several other announcements to kick off its conference.
One of the new (and overdue) features is dark mode support—something which is sure to be appreciated for all those late-night coding sessions.
GitHub Discussions is now available in public beta. The feature aims to make it easier to curate and maintain conversation threads, with controls for customising categories, transferring, and pinning discussions, and converting Issues into discussions.
Dirk Lemstra, Maintainer of ImageMagick, said:
“After using GitHub Discussions for one week, we decided to move the ImageMagick forum onto Discussions.
Our core team receives up to five questions from our community each day and prior to Discussions, people were opening issues, emailing us, or asking questions on our PHP forum. This combination left us with a scattered set of notifications.
Discussions save me time because now, it’s just one inbox — and that’s my GitHub notifications inbox.”
A new auto-merge feature for pull requests enables authors to opt into having a pull request merged automatically once its required reviews or status checks have passed.
The new feature will be available next week as a public beta on public repositories, and available to private repos on Team and GitHub Enterprise Cloud plans.
GitHub Actions has received various improvements which include protected environments, required reviewers, and deployment logs. A new workflow visualisation promises to make it easier to keep on top of things while keeping pipelines secure and compliant.
Finally, GitHub Advanced Security will enable customers to automate code scanning and secret scanning as part of their GHES deployment. Features like dependency review help to ensure maintainers and companies don’t import vulnerabilities into their codebase.
Dimosthenis Kaponis, CTO of Netdata, comments:
“If Advanced Security reports error issues, the pull request isn’t allowed to be merged. If a security issue is found, we’re informed immediately.
We go over anything GitHub has highlighted, and we make sure that it’s resolved before releasing a stable release.
For the developer who will press the merge button, it inspires confidence.”
That’s quite the bumper release of new features from GitHub on day one of Universe. We’re not expecting any further sizable announcements, but we’ll keep you posted.
You can tune-in to GitHub Universe here.
