GitHub Sponsors is long overdue. Any ethical concerns are mute on the part of repo maintainers, because those exist with or without the new donation tools which are largely “shortcut” links.

The OSS maintainers who previously demanded cash via PayPal or Patreon will continue their ways, and the maintainers who are ethical, transparent, and legal about any sponsorship will probably also continue in their ways as well. If anything, OSS maintainers tend to be some of the most ethical people around…

The WordPress community continues to be one of the most glaring examples of fraudulent endorsements and pay-to-play agreements between various players. Besides this, the hipster donation platforms like Patreon and Open Collective have begun banning and censoring random users based on political bias and so forth. Microsoft is arguably one of the more ethical Big Tech corporations currently, and many of their recent moves are refreshing to say the least.

One more reason to move your plugins off WordPress.org and onto a neutral U.S. Section 230 platform that empowers the authors.