If I were paid at the same rate I was at my job for writing my open source software, I’d probably be making six figures. So I’m going to say that I donate over $10,000 worth of my time every month to open source projects. xD

I’m a god damn philanthropist! If only the IRS took my word for it.

Zero and I feel bad about it.

In (very partial) mitigation, I regularly contribute bug reports and other detailed feedback on lots of issue trackers.

Here’s the fundamental problem. I benefit from a whole bunch of FOSS projects. I absolutely cannot afford to donate 5 USD to each one per month. Even donating $1 to each would be unaffordable - and of course that makes no sense because of the fees problem. It’s the same problem with podcasts, and indeed basically all internet content.

We have to find a way to make non-DRM micropayments work better. It’s the only alternative to the poisonous ad-based information economy. I so want a solution like Flattr to become widely adopted. That is: I decide a cap on my monthly donation total, and then that sum is divided up among the projects I choose according to criteria I choose.

~$10/mo currently but since I recently switched to Linux, and it’s working very well for me, I feel like upping it a little.

I’ve long considered donating to Mozilla since Firefox is by far my most used open source software. But they don’t seem to lack money. So, huh.

If I had to distribute money based on timeshare, Minecraft would get 49.5%, Cities Skylines would get 49.5%, and all the other programs would be left to fight for the scraps because I play those games like it was a full time job.

I have been writing OSS for so long, and I know for a fact some of it is widely used (one is a standard library for a popular language) that I figure I’m about even.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and I pay my dues by contributing. I figure folks who take the time to regularly write good, detailed, useful bug reports have, too. I’ve had people contribute translations; those count! I’ve had people submit PRs that were just spelling corrections in readmes - anybody who’s contributing to whatever their ability is counts. I can’t write C well anymore, and on some projects the best I can do is track something down to where I think the issue is; IME, that can cut a big fix effort down to a fraction of the time, if the submitter is right. And, of course, actual PRs that fix bugs are the best.

New feature PRs - I’m really guilty about submitting those, but they’re a mixed bag. They’re a lot of work for the maintainer, not least of which is the decision of whether they want it.

Anyway, there are more ways of contributing besides money, even for non-developers.

For myself, I’d rather have effort contributions than money contributions. Again, this is just me, but money brings with it a sense of obligation, and obligation takes the fun out of projects. That’s just a job, with less stability.

I do, occasionally, contribute to projects that solicit contributions - projects with maintainers who’ve faithfully been maintaining a project with regular releases for years - projects like Calibre. But in general, odds are not bad that ant given developer has used at least one of my projects at some point: in the entire Linux ecosystem, so many of us are using free software someone wrote without compensation, and it just feels a bit unfair that only some people benefit financially while the vast majority of OSS contributors receive nothing.

I haven’t counted but it’s more than 10 for sure. Kinda hard to calculate the proprietary software since I pay for it yearly but it’s more than the open source for sure. Usually don’t buy games but when I do, I try to spend at most 10 bucks per game