This idea has made me think of donating a certain percentage of my income each year to open source projects. Does anyone have a system for donating their personal funds to open source projects?
I am an open source developer who accepts donations. Whatever you do, I would recommend making a recurring donation. I like to say that one-time donations buy beer, while recurring donations buy sustainable open source development.
I would also suggest contributing to individuals directly. Seek out maintainers of the projects you want to support and see if they have a patreon or liberapay page.
I very much agree - we put most of our donations on a recurring basis. Oddly, a few projects specifically asked for a one-off donation because they felt like a recurring donation would make them feel like they "owed us" something. Of course, we don't have any conditions for our donation, but it was an interesting sentiment I hadn't expected to find.
I think it could be pretty cool to have a donation aggregator, though I'm not sure what it would do differently than what existing places I don't donate to do. Perhaps more transparency?
It'd be kind of neat to have 'OSS Index Funds' (misnomer to convey the idea) that a donation aggregator could provide. I could offer a fund for 'Rust' that might support 30% compiler team, 30% core team, 20% something else, 10% docs (I obviously don't know what the percentages should look like, just demonstrating). A different fund could be 'Programming Language Development' which might invest 20% in the Rust fund, 20% in Zig, and so on. A fund for Graphics like GIMP, Krita, Blender, etc.
Discovery of who to support is, maybe, one of the big problems preventing direct support. If you eliminate that problem without making people feel like they don't have a say and don't overwhelm them with information.... then maybe it could catch on?
Sometimes I've thought about donating, only to realise that its the website/readme/whatever that's making me think about it, and wondered how many projects I owe more to that don't have as good donation-grabbing copy that aren't getting as much.
And does it even make sense to support the project most valuable to you, or perhaps rather the most endangered that has any non-trivial value?
I think the "of choice" is the hard part here. For instance, if you're a JS developer: do you donate to Mozilla? NPM? Your JS framework? Other libraries you use?
I would also suggest contributing to individuals directly. Seek out maintainers of the projects you want to support and see if they have a patreon or liberapay page.