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GitHub Sponsors:

Exploring a New Way to Contribute to Open Source

Naomichi Shimada

Nara Institute of Science and

Technology, Japan

shimada.naomichi.sm3@is.naist.jp

Tao Xiao

Nara Institute of Science and

Technology, Japan

tao.xiao.ts2@is.naist.jp

Hideaki Hata

Shinshu University

Japan

hata@shinshu-u.ac.jp

Christoph Treude

University of Melbourne

Australia

christoph.treude@unimelb.edu.au

Kenichi Matsumoto

Nara Institute of Science and

Technology, Japan

matumoto@is.naist.jp

ABSTRACT

GitHub Sponsors, launched in 2019, enables donations to individ-

ual open source software (OSS) developers. Financial support for

OSS maintainers and developers is a major issue in terms of sus-

taining 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 ac-

tive than non-sponsored developers, (2) the possibility to receive

donations is related to whether there is someone in their commu-

nity who is donating, and (3) developers are sponsoring as a new

way to contribute to OSS. Our ndings are the rst step towards

data-informed guidance for using GitHub Sponsors, opening up

avenues for future work on this new way of nancially sustaining

the OSS community.

CCS CONCEPTS

• So cial and professional topics → Sustainability

;

• Software

and its engineering → Open source model.

KEYWORDS

GitHub Sponsors, Open Source, Sponsorship

ACM Reference Format:

Naomichi Shimada, Tao Xiao, Hideaki Hata, Christoph Treude, and Kenichi

Matsumoto. 2022. GitHub Sponsors: Exploring a New Way to Contribute

to Open Source. In 44th International Conference on Software Engineering

(ICSE ’22), May 21–29, 2022, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA,

12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3510003.3510116

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or

classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed

for prot or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation

on the rst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM

must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish,

to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specic permission and/or a

fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org.

ICSE ’22, May 21–29, 2022, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9221-1/22/05.. . $15.00

https://doi.org/10.1145/3510003.3510116

1 INTRODUCTION

Open source software (OSS) projects are often aected by economic

challenges, and soliciting donations is a common means of obtaining

funds for OSS projects. However, as pointed out by Staltz, many

OSS maintainers and developers do not generate enough income

to sustain their OSS projects [23].

In May 2019, GitHub introduced GitHub Sponsors [

], a service

which allows OSS developers to accept donations from other GitHub

users. While most OSS donation services in the past have targeted

projects, GitHub Sponsors is unique in that it allows users to donate

to individual OSS developers. GitHub advertises the service as “a

new way to contribute to open source”, in particular pointing out

the widespread dependence on OSS projects: “Sponsor the open

source software your team has built its business on. Fund the projects

that make up your software supply chain to improve its performance,

reliability, and stability.” Anyone who contributes to an OSS project

and lives in one of the 36 regions in which GitHub Sponsors was

available at the time of writing is eligible to become a sponsored

developer. Developers can join a waitlist, and once approved, a

‘Sponsor’ button will appear on their prole and they can dene

sponsorship tiers. As of now, GitHub matches contributions of up

to $5k during a developer’s rst year in GitHub Sponsors.

But who participates in GitHub Sponsors, what makes developers

more likely to receive sponsorship, and what challenges and benets

do GitHub Sponsors bring? To answer such questions, we conducted

a mixed-methods study of those who signed up for GitHub Sponsors

and those who contributed donations.

Existing work on donations in the context of OSS projects—

before the launch of GitHub Sponsors—reported that the activity

and popularity of a project on GitHub are positively correlated with

the likelihood of receiving donations, and projects that received

donations show a short-term increase in the number of commits

and a reduction in the time to resolve issues [

]. Krishnamurthy

et al. studied donations in SourceForge [

]. They reported that the

decision to donate is impacted by relational commitment with the

open source software platform, donation to projects, and accepting

donations from others. Furthermore, the length of association with

the platform and relational commitment aects donation levels.

Nakasai et al. studied the impact of donation badges on developers’

responses to Eclipse bug reports [

]. They reported that bug re-

ports from users who have donation badges used in Eclipse, take

less time to receive a reply from the developers than other bug

arXiv:2202.05751v1 [cs.SE] 11 Feb 2022

ICSE ’22, May 21–29, 2022, Pisburgh, PA, USA Shimada et al.

reports. Compared to these studies which investigated donations to

projects, in this work, we study donations to individual developers,

enabled by GitHub Sponsors.

From our quantitative analysis, we nd that sponsored develop-

ers are more active than those looking for sponsorship unsuccess-

fully, and that many of the sponsors are active developers them-

selves, eectively building clusters of sponsorship. Distinguishing

sponsored developers from non-sponsored developers, the presence

of sponsorship in their development community is an important

factor. Our qualitative analysis also reveals benets and challenges

related to GitHub Sponsors. Developers typically do not have chan-

nels at their disposal to attract sponsors and communicate with

those who might be interested in donating, but on the other hand,

many donate to show appreciation, not expecting anything specic

in return.

Signicance of research contribution. Given the sustainability con-

cerns aecting many OSS projects that are depended on by millions,

understanding how sponsorship can provide the needed support

is a crucial step towards ensuring that we can continue to rely on

OSS projects. GitHub Sponsor’s focus on enabling sponsoring of

individual developers instead of projects is unique and has not been

studied before. Our work provides insights into the characteristics,

benets, and challenges of the early adopters of GitHub Sponsors.

2 RESEARCH QUESTIONS

In this work, we conduct an exploratory study of GitHub Sponsors,

a new approach to support developers. Although GitHub Sponsors

allows GitHub users to sponsor organizations as well as individuals,

this study only focuses on the sponsorship of individual developers.

Also, this study only targets sponsorship by individual developers

and does not cover sponsorship by organizations. The main goal of

the study is to gain insights into the use of GitHub Sponsors among

individuals. Based on this goal, we constructed three main research

questions to guide our study. We present these main questions and

sub-questions along with their motivation.

RQ1: Who participates in GitHub Sponsors?

RQ1.1 : What are the characteristics of sponsored developers?

RQ1.2 : What are the characteristics of sponsors?

The motivation of our rst main research question

RQ1

is to set

the stage for the rest of the paper by providing demographic infor-

mation of involved receivers (RQ1.1) and sponsors (RQ1.2).

RQ2:

What characteristics make developers more likely to receive

sponsorship?

For OSS developers who want to obtain sponsorship, we set this

second research question (

RQ2

) to identify the characteristics of

developers who are likely to obtain sponsorship.

RQ3:

What are developers’ perceived challenges and benets re-

lated to sponsoring?

RQ3.1 : Why are developers looking for sponsors?

RQ3.2 : What is the impact of (not) getting sponsorship?

RQ3.3 : Why are developers sponsoring?

To deepen our investigation of the answers to

RQ2

, we then ask the

corresponding ‘why’ questions for

RQ3

, again from both sides of

a potential donation: why are developers looking for sponsorship

(

RQ3.1

) and why are developers sponsoring (

RQ3.3

)? We assumed

that the main challenge related to sponsorship is not receiving

money, so we asked about this explicitly in RQ3.2.

3 RESEARCH METHODS

In this section, we describe our methods for data collection and

analysis.

3.1 Data Collection

This section describes the steps to identify GitHub users who are

participating in GitHub Sponsors, i.e., registered developers who

are asking for sponsors, and GitHub users who are donating to

developers.

Preparing repositories.

Since there is no direct way to get

the users who participate in GitHub Sponsors, we rst examined

repositories to get the list of contributing GitHub users. In order to

cover as many users involved in GitHub sponsorship as possible,

we collected a large number of GitHub repositories, i.e., repositories

that were created between 2008 and 2020 and had 10 or more stars

when we accessed them. We will discuss the limitations of this

threshold of 10 stars in Section 5.1. Access and cloning was done

between January and March 2021, and 1,210,041 repositories were

collected. We excluded 387 repositories with no commits, resulting

in 1,209,654 repositories.

Obtaining contributors.

The GitHub REST API was used to

retrieve the contributors from each of the repositories collected; due

to API limitations, the top 500 contributors from each repository

were retrieved. When we made requests via API between June

and July 2021, there were repositories for which we could not

get contributors because the repositories had been deleted or set

to private, for example. We obtained 1,695,015 contributors from

1,168,856 repositories. The limitations of the threshold of the top

500 contributors are also discussed in Section 5.1.

Identifying GitHub Sponsors participants.

In July 2021, We

used the GitHub GraphQL API to identify developers who can

be sponsored via GitHub Sponsors, i.e., developers who are seek-

ing sponsorship. From the 1,695,015 contributors, we identied

9,366 such developers. After analyzing each developer’s user pro-

le page for GitHub Sponsors and removing developers who had

deleted their prole, we identied 3,697 developers who had ob-

tained sponsors (

sponsored non-sponsored sponsoring

years coding

less than 5 7 (4%) 4 (3%) 4 (6%)

5-9 44 (25%) 49 (38%) 17 (26%)

10-19 73 (41%) 47 (37%) 25 (38%)

20-29 33 (19%) 21 (16%) 10 (15%)

30 or more 20 (11%) 8 (6%) 10 (15%)

years on GitHub

less than 5 23 (13%) 18 (14%) 15 (23%)

5-9 98 (55%) 87 (67%) 37 (56%)

10 or more 56 (32%) 24 (19%) 14 (21%)

gender

male 157 (89%) 111 (86%) 60 (91%)

female 6 (3%) 8 (6%) 3 (5%)

non-binary, genderqueer, or gender non-conforming

8 (5%) 5 (4%) 2 (3%)

prefer not to say 6 (3%) 5 (4%) 1 (2%)

OSS contributions

full time 30 (17%) 15 (12%) 5 (8%)

part time 129 (73%) 96 (74%) 44 (67%)

other 18 (10%) 18 (14%) 17 (25%)

sum 177 (100%) 129 (100%) 66 (100%)

of developers identied in this way can be interpreted as the pro-

gramming languages of the ecosystems to which the developers

mainly contributed.

3.2 Survey

To understand how developers perceive GitHub sponsors

(RQ3)

, we

conducted a survey to get developer feedback on GitHub Sponsors.

In August 2021, we sent invitations to 2,000 randomly selected

sponsored developers, 2,000 non-sponsored developers, and 2,000

sponsors to participate in the survey, and received a total of 372

responses: 177 from sponsored developers, 129 from non-sponsored

developers, and 66 from sponsors. Table 1 presents an overview

of the demographics of our survey participants. Responses were

obtained from GitHub users with diverse years of experience. Most

of the respondents were male, but responses from other gender

minorities were also included. Most respondents’ contribution to

OSS is part time, but sponsored developers are more likely to be

full-time developers than others.

3.3 Qualitative Analysis

For the qualitative analysis of the survey responses, three of the

authors collaboratively took an initial look at all answers and dis-

cussed which themes were present in the data and how these themes

related to the research questions. One of the authors then formalised

this discussion into coding schemata. Three authors applied the

coding schemata to a random subset of the data, and one author n-

ished the annotation based on the encouraging kappa agreements.

We allowed multiple codes per answer. In all cases, the kappa agree-

ment was satisfactory after the rst pass, and we did not change

nor add codes during the process. We attribute this stability to the

fact that we had an initial discussion about all data, that most an-

swers were relatively short, and that this particular team of authors

have experience working together on qualitative data analysis from

previous research projects. We describe each coding schema in the

following questions.

Why are you looking for sponsors?

To answer

RQ3.1

, we

analyzed the reasons why OSS developers ask for donations. The

three raters independently labeled 29 answers from two groups

(from sponsored developers and non-sponsored developers). Then,

we calculated the kappa agreement of our coding schema from

three raters. Cohen’s kappa for this qualitative analysis is 0.7, which

indicates ‘substantial’ agreement [

]. The following list shows our

coding schema:

• funding a particular feature/ product

: We used this code

if the respondent mentioned something in particular (other

than the OSS project itself) that they were planning to use

the donations for, e.g., “Fund hosting costs for hosted projects.”

• gauge interest/satisfaction

: Some respondents indicated

using sponsorship as a way to receive feedback from the

community, in particular to assess the community’s interest

in the project, e.g., “To measure the degree of satisfaction with

my OSS works.”

• motivation

: We used this code if respondents were aware

that receiving motivations would increase their motivation,

e.g., “It highly motivates me if I get money as donations for

my work.”

• recognition/ appreciation

: If respondents expressed that

they wanted to give the community a way to express ap-

preciation or recognition, we used this code, e.g., “Why not,

mostly. Mostly boils down to recognition for the work since the

monetary amounts are negligible.”

• nancial support in general terms

: In cases where re-

spondents gave a somewhat generic answer related to mak-

ing money, we used this code, e.g., “to fund my open source

work.”

• none

: For respondents who did not mention a reason in

response to the question, we used the code ‘none’.

• not answered

: If the question was not answered, we coded

it as ‘not answered’.

Are you doing anything special to attract sponsors?

To get

a better understanding of what developers do to attract sponsors,

we analyzed the responses of the actions that developers men-

tioned in their survey responses. The three raters independently

coded 30 answers from two groups (from sponsored developers

and non-sponsored developers), achieving Cohen’s kappa of 0.91

or ‘almost perfect’ agreement [

]. The following list shows the

coding schema:

• perks for sponsors

: For responses which mentioned a spe-

cic perk that was only available to sponsors of their work,

we used this code, e.g., “I oer short consulting sessions (just

a 30-60 minute video call) for higher tier sponsors.”

• social media

: We used this code if respondents mentioned

a specic social media site or social media in general, e.g.,

“Twitter - tweet about my work.”

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