Ask HN: How to donate $1k to open source?

Option 1: Pick my favorite project and send them 1000$ -> simple but only one project benefits from my donation Option 1: Find projects or libs I am using and accept donations, use their donation systems, distribute the 1000$ -> very time consuming and cumbersome, I have to use different systems, but can support multiple projects. Unfortunately, the donation for one project will be quite small as it is just a fraction of the donation of 1000$.

Do you know any platforms or good solutions to distribute the 1000$ or support Open Source so that the 1000$ is used as effectively as possible?

[0] https://www.fsf.org/

[1] https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...

[2] https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Free_Software_Directory:About

On top of this, as a company, donating is… complicated. If you can do it, great, but it's often easier to find a project that has a support contract and pay for that. It gives you a real and justified expense and is in general more stable income for the devs.

Furthermore, a renewable contract gives the project predictable income, which is instrinsically worth more to the project.

If you have $1k and just want to give it away once, and want it to end up in open source, I think what's best is you pick your personal favourite project and double check they both need and can take the money (then move down the list if they don't). But if you can afford to give a recurring donation, go that route instead! Patreon is a good avenue for smaller projects that don't necessarily offer contracts of their own, but at that point there's a lot of money that goes into their fee.

Edit: Another potential avenue is donating directly to a developer for their open source work (Github Sponsors will let you do that), assuming there's a dev you like a lot for that.