[k_os]

You should put up a donation link. If more people do that and it becomes common practice to donate to useful open source tools / projects then imagine what more awesome stuff could be created. Many people desire to build tools but don't have the financial support to do so.

[thejosh]

This is what gittip is for.

And Kickstarter/Indiegogo/Crowdfunding has shown genuine interest to help fund useful tools and libraries lately which is great.

[canistr]

I think if Git Tip had a button on a GitHub repo (a la Heroku button), this would be amazing.

[whit537]

How about the Gittip badges from http://shields.io/?

[easytiger]

Can't disagree more. That completely misunderstands the motivating philosophy behind effort expenditure given to FLOSS.

It isn't about motivating people to do things; that creates abandonware. It is about solving a problem that needs solving.

[afarrell]

I'm confused by this. How does contributing money to people developing software for the commons lead to abandonware? And is abandonware a problem if it is free/open-source? Should I avoid publishing my hobby projects that I'm not planning to support?

[ams6110]

It encourages people to start up projects just to get the contributions, then abandon the projects when the initial stream of contributions dries up. Yeah abandonware is a problem for people who start to use it thinking there is a community of some sort behind it, and then are stuck with supporting it all on their own or having to find something else. Fortunately such projects are normally easy to spot once you've been burned a few times. Unfortunately they comprise 95% of what's on github.