Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

5-2022

Abstract

GitHub Sponsors, launched in 2019, enables donations to individual open source software (OSS) developers. Financial support for OSS maintainers and developers is a major issue in terms of sustaining OSS projects, and the ability to donate to individuals is expected to support the sustainability of developers, projects, and community. In this work, we conducted a mixed-methods study of GitHub Sponsors, including quantitative and qualitative analyses, to understand the characteristics of developers who are likely to receive donations and what developers think about donations to individuals. We found that: (1) sponsored developers are more active than non-sponsored developers, (2) the possibility to receive donations is related to whether there is someone in their community who is donating, and (3) developers are sponsoring as a new way to contribute to OSS. Our findings are the first step towards data-informed guidance for using GitHub Sponsors, opening up avenues for future work on this new way of financially sustaining the OSS community.

Keywords

GitHub Sponsors, Open Source, Sponsorship

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

ICSE-SEET '22: Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, 2022 May 21-29

First Page

1058

Last Page

1069

ISBN

9781450392211

Identifier

10.1145/3510003.3510116

Publisher

IEEE Computer Society

City or Country

Los Alamitos, CA

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3510003.3510116

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