I wouldn’t donate to projects that are already well-funded, or to foundations that spend a lot of money on the support of outside projects (I’d rather fund such projects directly, if I see them worthy).

Overall, I would prioritize small to medium projects that need funding the most. For example, I would donate to Lemmy, but not Mastodon.

Aside from that, I also care about actual openness of the project (i.e. free participation in its improvement), a strong open-source ethos, and independence from corporate backing.

Technically, nothing. I do not get much of disposable income and I did donate to 2 projects that are my favorites. Others are on the way, but not sure when I will be able to in near future. I really want to support them.

What would stop me from donating is frequency of how I use that particular project. Say, I run uptime kuma. In reality I barely use it and no one except me even knows that I run one. I might as well just disable it and nothing would change in my setup. There is not a single service integral to my setup that I need to inform my users (there are like 2.5) to check uptime of.

As another example, Tailscale will skip my donation. A useful thing, yes. They have paid memberships and their free tier is barebones WG setup that is just easy to do. They are getting paid by commerial users. They dont need my 50 euros as much as say Jellyfin does.

The other point to skip donating would be vibe coding. I doubt vibe coding project will be updated enough, will be secure, and generally a solid projects. Everything I’ve seen so far is either abandoned fast, has some major vulnerabilities, or does something that other projects have already figured out. I skip even trying these.

Other than that, if I’d have a disposable income that I can spend on anything, I’d donate to all (F)OSS that I use. The community rocks and we should support good software anyway.

Knowing where my money will make the best impact. Like I know there’s a lot tools and libraries that hold up the world, but which ones need the help? Which ones don’t?

The makers of the OSS having an actual forum instead of a fucking worthless Discord server. That’s why I dropped Bazzite and donated to Linux Mint.

Ah, the joys of being Brazilian… cries in equivalent 850USD/month salary

The main things I’d end up donating to are alternative operating systems or people making emulators/software for them, like AROS, Kolibri, Haiku or ReactOS

I support very few open source projects because ultimately charity is not a sustainable way of financing things. It makes me feel like it’s up to me, an individual, to carry the weight of the world and ultimately too depressing. Fostering open source should be handled by governments, same as other stuff that’s done due to common interest, like schools and hospitals.

Okay, I am pretty extreme in my views of genAI in coding, so take me with a pillar of salt, but I’d need to be sure the devs and contributions ain’t vibe coded bullshit or that the people doing it actually understand what the hell their software actually does, not just code wise and not just some genAI explanation of what the code does either. Then I’d feel a little more comfortable donating in today’s day and age.

Last thing we need are people using genAI to code and then 2 generations later nobody actually knows how to code because they’ve all destroyed their brains and lost their human status to genAI.

Having enough disposable income.

Basically, it’s a cognitive nuke.

Okay, this piece of software is worth $5/mo to me. But it’s basically just a wrapper around this library, so I guess most of it should go to the base library? But the wrapper’s author is very active in the development of the library, so that swings it back in their favor.

But none of this would be possible without Framework X, so maybe that deserves a big chunk. But most of the contributors to that are for-profit companies that just wanna leverage OSS for free patches.

Oh and look at that, there’s a milestone issue in the wrapper’s issue tracker saying they wanna switch frameworks. Oh, and another issue asking if the project is dead because it’s just dependabot merges recently.

I donate to a number of free-software projects via https://liberapay.com/ which lets me control the individual donation amounts and frequencies, and pay from a single account that I top up periodically.

When approached about allowing me to donate to them via Liberapay, I’ve had several people respond positively and set up their end of the deal. It often just takes a friendly conversation.

If there was a single solution that provided the following:

• allow me to donate a set, reoccurring, monthly sum. I.e $20, 40, 60, etc, to 1 service
• that service would then allow me to add “sub-services” like nixos, postmarketos, firefox, whatever, and it would split out my lum sum between all the subservices.
• the service was 100% transparent, vetting, and vouched for, with paper trails showing the money actually went to the sub services and how much of a cut they take.
• if it offered a local only program or app that would analyze what projects I used (its easy to forget about all the packages that linchpin everything we use) to help offer me suggestions on who I could donate to.

Basically a Spotify for open source, but instead of basing it on my listen history and contracts with record labels, let me choose manually how my subscription payment is split out.

I keep meaning to take a deeper look at open collective, but haven’t found the time or had anyone else (donator or developer) share their experiences.

I think I’d have a hard time picking out single projects to support. I sometimes do one-time donations to things I like (for example I donated to LocalSend one time when I discovered it and liked it a lot).

I have a regular donation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation though, which I feel sort of covers the same area in a more general sense.

I’m already pretty broke and throw projects I like some money here or there. Usually $10-$20 or so. Like a beer or two at the pub.

Transparency. I dont donate to projects that dont regularily (monthly/quarterly) publish the amount of money they receive through donations and their costs.

An example of how to do this well here https://tchncs.de/en/donate

Doesnt need to be that fancy of course, can just be a table with numbers.

Is there some sort of “index fund” for open source software. I use tons of open source software and intermittently sprinkle one time donations on certain projects. I’d rather have it simplified and donate regularly to a foundation that spreads the funds fairly to big projects and small ones and one that I might not use but benefit the world at large.