The Influence of Sponsorship on Open-Source Software Developers' Activities on GitHub

Studies on the OSS communities have shown that financial supports are critical to OSS developers and projects to maintain their progress and sustainability. However, there were few developers being paid directly for maintaining OSS projects in the past. The GitHub Sponsors program that brings financial supports to the general OSS developers in GitHub-the world's largest OSS platform may make a difference on this situation in the future. In this paper, we present a data set on GitHub Sponsors and conduct a data-driven study to analyze the participants of the program and the impact of sponsorships to developers' activities and their projects' outcomes and qualities. The results of our survey suggest that most developers state they will contribute more with sponsorships and provide some privilege for their sponsors. And through quantitative study, we find that developers make more contributions on GitHub after they got/offered sponsorships. Moreover, gaining sponsorship also has a weakly positive impact on developers' collaborators that did not get sponsorship. And not only developers, but their own or contributed projects also can be motivate by sponsorships. Our findings are useful to the community by understanding the impact of sponsorships on users' activities and projects' progress and sustainability, and helping the managers to improve the current financial support mechanism.