[iforgotpassword]

I've been thinking about this on and off. I try to support OSS (currently via Patreon only) and am currently at about 55€ per month. It is really hard to pick the right projects, because I use a lot of OSS, and it's not like I have infinite money to spend.

So right now I mostly fund smaller projects because it feels they need it more, but at the same time I think I should also consider how important some piece of software is to me, or how much I depend on it, which gets really hard as soon as you don't just include "visible" software, but also libraries. I guess I'd have a really bad time without a jpeg library, for example. But that leads into your point about rewarding contributors. Ideally, every project that receives donations will fairly redistribute a share of it to every contributor and library they depend on, but that seems absolutely impractical to get right, especially for larger projects.

Also, should you take the complexity of a project into account? Not to diminish the work of the folks behind eg libjpeg-turbo, but a jpeg encoder/decoder isn't exactly rocket science, so should they receive less than for example libx264?

So yeah, I think this is a fairly deep topic that you can put a lot of thought into, and even get a bit philosophical about. Interested to hear other people's approach to this.