Research Artifact - GitHub Sponsors: Exploring a New Way to Contribute to Open Source

GitHub Sponsors 于 2019 年推出，支持向个人开源软件 (OSS) 开发人员捐款。对 OSS 维护者和开发者的财务支持是维持 OSS 项目的一个主要问题，向个人捐款的能力有望支持开发者、项目和社区的可持续性。在这项工作中，我们对 GitHub 赞助商进行了混合方法研究，包括定量和定性分析，以了解可能接受捐赠的开发人员的特征以及开发人员对个人捐赠的看法。我们发现：(1) 赞助开发者比非赞助开发者更活跃，(2) 接受捐赠的可能性与社区中是否有人捐赠有关，(3) 开发者作为新人赞助为 OSS 做贡献的方式。我们的发现是迈向使用 GitHub 赞助商的数据知情指导的第一步，为未来在财务上维持 OSS 社区的这种新方式的工作开辟了道路。

GitHub Sponsors launched in 2019, enabling financial donations to individual open-source software (OSS) developers. Financial support for OSS maintainers and developers is a major challenge in sustaining OSS projects, and the ability to donate directly to individuals is expected to support the sustainability of developers, their projects and communities. In this work, we conduct a mixed-methods study on GitHub Sponsors, including quantitative and qualitative analyses, to understand the characteristics of developers who may receive donations and developers' perceptions towards individual donations. Our findings include: (1) Sponsored developers are more active than non-sponsored developers; (2) The likelihood of receiving donations is correlated with whether someone in the developer's community has donated; (3) The ways in which new sponsored developers contribute to OSS. Our findings represent the first step towards data-informed guidance for leveraging GitHub Sponsors data, paving the way for future research on this novel approach to financially sustaining OSS communities.