一句话：通过混合方法研究开源项目捐赠，发现捐赠请求常见但无证据表明捐赠提升项目活跃度。
开源项目作为关键基础设施，资金与可持续性面临挑战。本文研究开源捐赠这一新兴现象：量化GitHub上请求捐赠的项目数量，统计建模请求与获得捐赠的项目特征，分析资金需求与用途，并评估捐赠是否达到预期效果。结果发现25,885个项目请求捐赠，多用于支持工程活动；但没有明确证据表明捐赠影响项目活跃度，且捐赠用途多样，由此提出关于有效资助的新研究问题。
Open source is ubiquitous and many projects act as critical infrastructure, yet funding and sustaining the whole ecosystem is challenging. While there are many different funding models for open source and concerted efforts through foundations, donation platforms like PayPal, Patreon, and OpenCollective are popular and low-bar platforms to raise funds for open-source development. With a mixed-method study, we investigate the emerging and largely unexplored phenomenon of donations in open source. Specifically, we quantify how commonly open-source projects ask for donations, statistically model characteristics of projects that ask for and receive donations, analyze for what the requested funds are needed and used, and assess whether the received donations achieve the intended outcomes. We find 25,885 projects asking for donations on GitHub, often to support engineering activities; however, we also find no clear evidence that donations influence the activity level of a project. In fact, we find that donations are used in a multitude of ways, raising new research questions about effective funding.
DOI 原文 ·
@inproceedings{paperbot5596,
title = {How to not get rich},
author = {Cassandra Overney and Jens Meinicke and Christian Kästner and Bogdan Vasilescu},
booktitle = {ICSE},
year = {2020},
doi = {10.1145/3377811.3380410}
}