I depend <i>a lot</i> on FLOSS for my work (and personal life) and I am doing my tiny bit to contribute and I am doing some financial donations too. Especially for the work part I'm more and more starting to feel it's my duty to help out financially, we've all seen too many stories of underfunded FLOSS projects not having the capacity to fix crucial bugs causing severe security problems, or projects throwing in the towel leaving downstream projects stranded. Most (all?) of the companies I've worked with in my career depend heavily (completely?) on FLOSS to do their heavy lifting. A typical business application build upon FLOSS covers less that 1‰ of the entire deployed code base so some compensation for those hard working maintainers and developers would seem helpful.<p>Doing ad hoc donations as I do now doesn't feel very constructive to me so I'm considering to do (automatically) reoccurring donations to my favorite organisations and tools, which doesn't seem fair to the stuff I do depend on but don't have warm feelings for, but I gotta start some where, right? What projects and organisations are you and/or the company you work for supporting? Any tips?
You could look through your package manager's dependency graph, to find those projects which are more "core" (i.e. those which are depended-on by the most things you use).<p>When Ubuntu added paid-for software to their package UI, there were discussions about making it easier to pay FOSS developers too, but I don't think it got anywhere:<p><a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DonationSystemSpecification" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DonationSystemSpecification</a><p><a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareDonations" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareDonations</a>
Since the ways in which software development sucks are not that far up the scale of sucking and supporting Kubernetes is charitable contributions to Google, maybe start elsewhere by donating toward alleviating mortal problems like hunger and disease?<p>The question is are you investing in yourself (no matter how round about) or alleviating true misery?<p>Good luck.