  While many forms of financial support are currently available, there are
still many complaints about inadequate financing from software maintainers. In
May 2019, GitHub, the world's most active social coding platform, launched the
Sponsor mechanism as a step toward more deeply integrating open source
development and financial support. This paper collects data on 8,028
maintainers, 13,555 sponsors, and 22,515 sponsorships and conducts a
comprehensive analysis. We explore the relationship between the Sponsor
mechanism and developers along four dimensions using a combination of
qualitative and quantitative analysis, examining why developers participate,
how the mechanism affects developer activity, who obtains more sponsorships,
and what mechanism flaws developers have encountered in the process of using
it. We find a long-tail effect in the act of sponsorship, with most
maintainers' expectations remaining unmet, and sponsorship has only a
short-term, slightly positive impact on development activity but is not
sustainable. While sponsors participate in this mechanism mainly as a means of
thanking the developers of OSS that they use, in practice, the social status of
developers is the primary influence on the number of sponsorships. We find that
both the Sponsor mechanism and open source donations have certain shortcomings
and need further improvements to attract more participants.
