The code many of the world's largest software companies not only use, but are dependent on, are propped up by a small handful of code maintainers. In many cases, they do it for peanuts. I remember when FOSS was starting to take off, people saying "code should be free," etc., but years later, the real human cost of depending on someone's good nature and gratuity seems like a miss. But how to determine which software to support? A one-time $5 donation to the cURL project seems like a drop in the bucket, but if we were all acting as benefactors we'd be doing that for hundreds of projects over the course of a year. Do I support those projects instead of the cool, fully functional downstream apps I self-host that are more visibly asking for coffee money? I don't have a good solution, to be honest.