Analysis of Donations in the Eclipse Project

Abstract

Although development activities, such as submitting patches and working with bug reports, are common contributions in open source software (OSS) projects, making donations is also an important contribution. Some OSS development projects actively collect donations by preparing benefits for donors who promote donations. In this research, we study the Eclipse project to analyze donations. We analyzed donor lists and release dates, and found the following: (1) benefits can be motivations for donations, (2) although the number of developers is small in all donors, they donated more than others, and (3) new releases are triggers of donations, but bugs negatively affect the amount of donations.