>They have a special section in their ToS that prohibits advertising

Ehm, your quote does not quite support your statement:

>We do not generally prohibit use of GitHub for advertising

It's a TOS, worded for PR, besides which it's unenforceable and at the whim of GitHub.

It's like building a business on Google Reader or FB Parse.

We have advocates at GitHub and are in discussions with their compliance team. Code Sponsor is not directly tied to GitHub for it to be successful. Many of our developers are making money through different channels such as npm or their own generated documentation website.

Even though GitHub may say we cannot do this on their website, it does not prevent developers from generate a healthy side income building OSS.

Here's a blog post we just released which includes links to different developer repos and sites (aside from GitHub) https://medium.com/@codesponsor/fighting-for-open-source-sus...