[michaelt]

I donate about $150 to Canonical any time I download Ubuntu - but I'm pretty sure this is a flawed approach.

After all, if I install a package, which depends on something which depends on something which depends on a library for left-padding strings, it's unlikely the library author sees a cent. And each of those levels doesn't just have developers - they have package maintainers, people doing bug triage, people maintaining test infrastructure - and the tools those people use.

Unfortunately I think this would be very difficult to resolve - as the problem of fairly distributing donations would have a very large political element.

[zanny]

Canonical themselves are only developing a tiny fraction of even their default suite of software anyway.

If you want to contribute to open source software in general, Software in the Public Interest is probably the best general fund to stick your money in, since they provide financial support to several distributions, LibreOffice, FFmpeg, Postgres, Xorg, etc.

Also, set your amazon smile donations to go to them, since they are a non-profit!

[pjmlp]

I also do it donate to Ubuntu and other FOSS projects on Windows like Notepad++, WinMerge and others.

But I also agree, if those authors don't get a regular stream of income, it is very hard to make a living, specially from native desktop applications.

Very few home users care for books or trainings.

[jldugger]

I wasn't aware Canonical, a for-profit company, could accept donations.