I have no money atm but my last round of FOSS donations was just picking based on a function of how much I use a piece of software; how much I like it; and how much money I think it already gets. e.g. I didn’t donate to the Linux kernel because that’s already well-funded, even though I use it every day and like it well enough.

I think my last donations included River (the Wayland compositor I use). For the life of me I can’t remember what else there was but I tend to do rounds of donations when I have money to spare and just pick software based on the above criteria.

When I work with Ardour professionally, I always make a donation on a per-project basis, depending on budget of said project.

It is truly Pro Grade software, it deserves it.

And if the budget is small, I do i small donation, easy :)

Lemmy and Accrescent.

None. Because I’m skint.

The NetBSD Foundation

Immich, it makes digital sovereignty possible thanks to it appealing UI (and it’s quite solid otherwise too).

KDE

Octoprint. It’s web page front end for 3d printers. Instead of copying to an SD card, walking to the printer, loading the file and printing, I can just upload and print. It also has camera support for timelapses and a very healthy addon ecosystem. I use it on both of my printers.

Gnome and Solus

I’ve always donated to Signal, Bitwarden, and KDE. Lemmy got added to the list this year, plus I always try to support a quality project that’s between a rock and a hard place. I gave to the Oregon State University open source lab this year when I heard about their struggles. They’re why Mozilla is a thing along with many other foundational components of the open internet.

I find it important to support projects that contribute to the greater free software ecosystem. I pick projects I benefit from and whose continued existence I am invested in, despite any faults.

• The NetBSD Project
• The Free Software Foundation (FSF)
• Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
• The SDF plan9front server
• Project Gutenberg
• Standard Ebooks
• The Internet Archive (IA)
• The Wikimedia Foundation

I budget my donations so I make an effort to see who I think need it the most. For example, I use Tor daily, but they have huge institutional funding. My to-do list app doesn’t.

There are also some worthy candidates who simply reject donations, like Handbrake.

A few I haven’t seen mentioned:

• Small websites anyone can use for FOSS services, like (e.g. Private.coffee, Disroot, Nadeko, Riseup)
• Any of the 5 remaining Invidious instances, Google has put effort into killing off other instances. Same with other social media alternative frontends.
• Someone mentioned F-Droid, I don’t know what I’d do without the Google Store alternatives like Aurora.
• yt-dlp devs
• Lemmy and various instances
• Your operating systems, incl phones and servers if relevant
• Codeberg
• A few FOSS softwares used for non-fediverse sites I use. Look at all the sites you use and think about which ones are probably underfunded. Don’t be afraid to ask if they haven’t said anything.

It’s not very frequent, but I usually give money to Jami and to Lemmy.

I support Thunderbird and Lemmy.

I support Thunderbird because it’s a great email client and I use it daily. I feel like I owe them at least a few euros a month.

I support the development of Lemmy because it’s a social media platform without a large company controlling it’s content, and keeping that afloat with a small monthly payment is worth it to me.

Just signal for now