My experiment with GitHub Sponsors

I’ve been using open-source software for a very long time but rarely give anything back. I’ve made a few small pull requests to some small projects and donated to the PHP Foundation once. That’s about it, even though my entire career runs on open source; the operating system, programming language, frameworks, libraries, all of it.

I had been thinking about sponsoring projects on GitHub for a while. My first instinct was to do it through the organisations I work at, but convincing any organisation to sponsor open-source creators without getting anything in return is a hard sell (side note: Especially when those organisations are preparing for budget cuts…). And even when the will is there, bureaucracy tends to kill any initiative before it goes anywhere.

So I just started doing it myself. My work depends on too many people and organisations to sponsor them all, and I didn’t want to get bogged down trying to figure out who “deserves” it most. Therefore I just pick a few reasonable candidates at random each month and make a one-time $5 donation to each.

I’ve been doing this for two months now, and it taught me a few small things.

GitHub makes it very easy to sponsor OSS contributors.

If you’re not sure who to sponsor, GitHub has a page that lists people and organisations who may be most “deserving” of a donation, based on what you use. By default it shows results for your personal account, but you can switch to any organisation you’re part of using the dropdown on the left.

Bear in mind that this overview is far from complete. It only shows creators who have enabled sponsorships on GitHub, and the most-used packages aren’t necessarily the most important ones in your work.

In my case, I came across many developers I had never heard of. Some do a surprising amount of important work under the radar. Others seem to be on the list mainly because they once published a small package that somehow became widely used. Some creators also appear twice: once under their personal account and again under the project or GitHub organisation they maintain.

The first time you donate, GitHub gives you a little badge on your profile. It’s completely useless, but maybe that’s already enough of an incentive for some people to try donating at least once.

You can choose whether you want to sponsor a creator monthly or just one time. Many creators offer monthly sponsorship tiers, some of which come with (mostly negligible) benefits.

You can generally choose how much you want to donate. But strangely, not always. Some creators have set a minimum donation amount, and some of those minimums are surprisingly high. You cannot donate less than $11 to Fabien Potencier, for example. Derick Rethans, who maintains PHP’s debugger, doesn’t accept anything less than $25. I think that’s a bit much, so I skipped over these accounts.

Most Europeans don’t really use credit cards. To me, they’re just debit cards with extra steps. I have one that I really only use for travel and monthly payments to a few US services that only accept credit cards.

So when I suddenly went on a donation spree, making multiple payments to GitHub in quick succession, my bank “helpfully” blocked my card almost immediately. I had to contact customer service to get it unblocked. It didn’t take long, but it was a bit unexpected and scary because I had to travel abroad the week after.

Once I had sponsored enough creators, I noticed that literally every person I had sponsored is either a white male or an organisation headed by a white male. Curious, I looked further. There appears to be remarkably little diversity: virtually all open-source creators are white men, at least for the packages I use. I went looking for creators who are not already overrepresented in tech (white, East-Asian, or South-Asian men) and couldn’t find any…