If I were paid at the same rate I was at my job for writing my open source software, I’d probably be making six figures. So I’m going to say that I donate over $10,000 worth of my time every month to open source projects. xD

I’m a god damn philanthropist! If only the IRS took my word for it.

If I had to distribute money based on timeshare, Minecraft would get 49.5%, Cities Skylines would get 49.5%, and all the other programs would be left to fight for the scraps because I play those games like it was a full time job.

I have been writing OSS for so long, and I know for a fact some of it is widely used (one is a standard library for a popular language) that I figure I’m about even.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and I pay my dues by contributing. I figure folks who take the time to regularly write good, detailed, useful bug reports have, too. I’ve had people contribute translations; those count! I’ve had people submit PRs that were just spelling corrections in readmes - anybody who’s contributing to whatever their ability is counts. I can’t write C well anymore, and on some projects the best I can do is track something down to where I think the issue is; IME, that can cut a big fix effort down to a fraction of the time, if the submitter is right. And, of course, actual PRs that fix bugs are the best.

New feature PRs - I’m really guilty about submitting those, but they’re a mixed bag. They’re a lot of work for the maintainer, not least of which is the decision of whether they want it.

Anyway, there are more ways of contributing besides money, even for non-developers.

For myself, I’d rather have effort contributions than money contributions. Again, this is just me, but money brings with it a sense of obligation, and obligation takes the fun out of projects. That’s just a job, with less stability.

I do, occasionally, contribute to projects that solicit contributions - projects with maintainers who’ve faithfully been maintaining a project with regular releases for years - projects like Calibre. But in general, odds are not bad that ant given developer has used at least one of my projects at some point: in the entire Linux ecosystem, so many of us are using free software someone wrote without compensation, and it just feels a bit unfair that only some people benefit financially while the vast majority of OSS contributors receive nothing.

Zero and I feel bad about it.

In (very partial) mitigation, I regularly contribute bug reports and other detailed feedback on lots of issue trackers.

Here’s the fundamental problem. I benefit from a whole bunch of FOSS projects. I absolutely cannot afford to donate 5 USD to each one per month. Even donating $1 to each would be unaffordable - and of course that makes no sense because of the fees problem. It’s the same problem with podcasts, and indeed basically all internet content.

We have to find a way to make non-DRM micropayments work better. It’s the only alternative to the poisonous ad-based information economy. I so want a solution like Flattr to become widely adopted. That is: I decide a cap on my monthly donation total, and then that sum is divided up among the projects I choose according to criteria I choose.

My company does one day of work on Foss software each month to honor what the community does for us. We use nearly exclusively Foss software. My employees can freely choose which projects they support or what apps they build with that time. But usually they end up building or fixing something thats helping them with the job they are doing for a client or has annoyed them during that time.

Edit: everything be build, we publish under MIT license.

Edit 2: we are 4 people, I’m the only full time employee.

I donate $10 each to the EFF and FSF. I’m not sure whether the money to the latter goes to development or advocacy, and don’t mind either way.

…at least, I think I do. I should double-check that they haven’t lapsed without me noticing.

I very rarely buy software, and when I do it’s games bought on deep discount. I honestly don’t think I’ve willingly paid for a proprietary non-game application since Windows 95 (in 1995, when I was a kid and didn’t know better).

There are a few projects I’ve wanted to donate to. Literally couldn’t figure out how in most of them. There was another one that they were asking for way too much information for me to simply donate some money.

So total sum, so far is zero dollars.

I haven’t counted but it’s more than 10 for sure. Kinda hard to calculate the proprietary software since I pay for it yearly but it’s more than the open source for sure. Usually don’t buy games but when I do, I try to spend at most 10 bucks per game

People answering in $ as if we all have the same wealth and income.

Anti-libre software: 0%

Per month, zero.

After a few donations that eventually turned into mandatory subscriptions I only pay for finished products now.

I’m not paying you to beta test your project for you!

$0 because we can barely make ends meet due to layoffs. The Trump admin’s slashing of grants and departments has been disastrous. My wife lost her job, my brother’s non-profit lost a quarter of their expected cash (grants), my sister lost a year of work after they slashed her $1mill NEH grant and has an uncertain future now (academic), my company lost a client that provided 10% of our annual revenue (they had grants they used to hire us), it’s fucking relentless.

$0 in donations. I also rarely buy software of any sort, except for mobaxterm.

10-15€. Usually 10 for asahi and the rest for other projects I happen to be happy about

At least a couple of dollars one time donation if I used the software for some time. If it is very useful software for me I donate more often. I try to avoid proprietary software for ideological reasons, so can’t really compare for this reason.

This might be kinda long, not sure if it’s what you’re looking for. But here goes.

For the last 20 years I have been largely in the Apple ecosystem and enjoy paying for good software whether closed or OSS. Started the career I have today thanks to the indie Apple software scene and the iPhone’s launch. I probably have more app licenses and subscriptions than your average person, I suspect largely for closed source apps (Things 3, Ivory for Mastodon, Affinity Photo/Designer suite, Procreate, Pixaki, etc.). I despise ads, so I also pay for things like Apple Music, YouTube Premium, and even Twitch Turbo because I use the hell out of YouTube (and Twitch to a lesser extent).

I’m also a gamer and I’ve moved from Xbox, to PlayStation, and now 100% on PC, Steam, and Steam Deck. Have bought plenty of games, DLCs, and IAPs for stuff like cosmetics. I know, I’m the worst.

Since I got serious on Mastodon in 2019, I have started seeking out OSS for certain things. I donate small amounts monthly to both the main Mastodon project and to the two instances I use (toot.cafe and mstdn.games). I just started donating a couple bucks monthly to the Lemmy.world Ko-Fi, which I believe supports their other projects (which I haven’t started using).

Edit: I pay Masto $20/year and I think $1/month to each of the instances.

While I have gotten angrier about the state of where tech and even Apple have started going, I’m not sure if a Linux PC and home-brewing my own kernels and writing all my own apps is anywhere in my future (yes, I know Steam Deck is Linux). I might be open to exploring a Linux PC eventually, but I’m also at a tricky point in my life where I need to find a new career path sooner than later, and tossing a full platform shift into the mix would, pragmatically, do more harm than good. But I have definitely started leaning more socialist in my politics and personal preferences for supporting communities and software. I’m donating where I can.