[d-us-vb]

Then just donate to the projects that you use maybe? Certainly there are some OSS projects that don't need our help (Chromium, for example), but there are lots that do:

- Emacs packages like Consult, Denote, Helm, Magit, and many others

- Anki

- Recoll

- FSF

- Virtually all community driven linux distros

If you want to make the argument that "I don't know if I can trust the maintainer to actually put my hard earn money to good use in improving the project", then I would say "just be ethical; the laborer deserves his wages".

Not so hot take: FOSS should be treated as shareware was in the 80s and 90s.