Analyzing the Usage of Donation Platforms for PyPI Libraries

2025-03-11

AI Summary

This study investigates the adoption of donation platforms by open-source libraries in the PyPI ecosystem to assess maintainers’ capacity to obtain sustainable financial support. Methodologically, we crawled PyPI and GitHub metadata, performed webpage parsing, cross-platform link alignment, temporal validity verification, and PageRank-driven dependency-chain analysis. Our key contributions are threefold: (1) Over half of PyPI project pages lack donation links, which instead concentrate on corresponding GitHub repositories; (2) More than 50% of donation links are defunct, with GitHub Sponsors emerging as the dominant platform; (3) Donation adoption rates differ markedly across dependency layers—32.7% for dependency-type packages versus only 6.1% for top-level packages—revealing a structural stratification in OSS economic sustainability. These findings provide empirical evidence and methodological foundations for evaluating open-source ecosystem health and optimizing funding mechanisms.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Linked Open Data, Knowledge Graphs & KB Completion
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Humans and AI: Crowd Sourcing and Human Computation

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Sustainability of Web economics
• Responsible Web: Sustainability and climate impact of web technologies
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity

Abstract

Software systems rely heavily on open source software (OSS) libraries, which offer benefits but also pose risks. When vulnerabilities arise, the OSS community may struggle to address them due to inactivity or lack of resources. Research highlights the link between OSS maintenance and financial support. To sustain the OSS ecosystem, maintainers should register on donation platforms and link these profiles on their project pages, enabling financial support from users and industry stakeholders. However, a detailed study on donation platform usage in OSS is missing. This study analyzes the adoption of donation platforms in the PyPI ecosystem. For each PyPI library, we retrieve assigned URLs, dependencies, and, when available, owner type and GitHub donation links. Using PageRank, we analyze different subsets of libraries from both a library and dependency chain perspective. Our findings reveal that donation platform links are often omitted from PyPI project pages and instead listed on GitHub repositories. GitHub Sponsors is the dominant platform, though many PyPI-listed links are outdated, emphasizing the need for automated link verification. Adoption rates vary significantly across libraries and dependency chains: while individual PyPI libraries show low adoption, those used as dependencies have much higher usage. This suggests that many dependencies actively seek financial support, benefiting developers relying on PyPI libraries.

Problem

• Analyzes donation platform usage in PyPI libraries.
• Highlights low adoption of donation links on PyPI pages.
• Identifies GitHub Sponsors as the dominant donation platform.

Innovation

• Analyzes donation platform usage in PyPI libraries
• Uses PageRank for library and dependency analysis
• Highlights need for automated link verification