[rvz]

Personally I don't, but I know people who do and whilst meeting and chatting with them, they are very encouraging to newcomers who want to attract new contributors. Without them, most of all the software used by everyone would be non-existent.

Why?

Some of them tell me that this helps them improve their skills and allows transparency in the project which helps their project in being trustworthy than the alternatives. Promoting more FLOSS-based software.

Why not?

While for many years, it has been a voluntary endeavour for devs and they take donations or sponsorship to fund their development. On Github, unless you are lucky enough to be a celebrity programmer of a famous project, this is difficult for many to build such a reputation and release a useful project for free to get paid for it. Thus, GitHub has accelerated this entitlement and only the famous programmers with a solid fanbase will reap its benefits.

I think it would be better to donate to an OSS org for more devs to get paid rather than to a specific individual/developer, unless they are the sole owner of the project.