Given that adding a tangible perk like this possibly moves a sponsorship from goodwill to a transaction with exchanged goods, this can have significant tax implications depending on the jurisdiction.

Building out more and more Patreon-like features without the proper tax support starts to feel borderline irresponsible on Github's part.

This seems to go against the nature of open source, and almost feels wrong. I see how it enables monetisation (pay for my sponsor and you get both the app and source!) but I don't think I could justify using it.

An open license generally means "now that you have the app, you have the rights to [...many things...], including distribution, on your own terms (but keep compatible with the license, obvs.)." For whomever the author/s has licensed it to.

But no license I've seen so far said "you (or the author/s) MUST distribute this to everyone." Once you've distributed the app, the licensee gets the rights, sure; but there's no requirement "you must grant license to anyone who asks."

This is somewhat unintuitive - and also mostly moot, as anyone who is already granted a permissive license may also distribute the app themselves - but with open-source apps going for this, it would become "here's the official way of supporting the author, and if you dig a bit, here's the cheap but legal way of using the app just the same." Sometimes all it takes is for the "will support the author" path to be the path of least resistance...

In other words, foo/bar the original repo might be paid access, xyz/bar the exact copy might be gratis; the only difference being "but foo/bar is the original author's version"

Open source does not mean a price of zero.

I welcome this step.

This is interesting, since new features on GH can have such big impact.

Are there examples where users have been working around this potentially “missing” feature previously?

Also, sometimes GH has expansive blog entries contextualizing changes after the feature or UI update has gone live. Perhaps that is coming.

The next Faker.JS would just hide the repo behind a $10000 sponsorship

Seems like they are trying to get a bite of Patreon's cake. There's a fair market for paywalled dev builds in game dev, I wonder if that will become more popular in other fields of programming as well.