Bash is mantained by only one guy named Chet and almost all linux devices in the world use it. https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/

archive.org

It was just attacked by hackers a few months ago, no to mention all the lawsuits they’ve been getting, and cost of maintenance of TERABYTES of data. They really need the funding to survive.

Edit: Missed the FOSS part, but still, its worth mentioning. archive.org is not an open source software, but they are a non-profit doing something that benefits all of us. And they are transparent about how they operate. More like a “Free and Transparent Community Service”, rather than “FOSS”. And not to mention, the many FOSS software they could preserve in case they stop getting maintained, so they could get picked up later, and not be forever lost. It goes hand-in-hand with the philosophy of FOSS: benefiting society.

Millions of people use beautifulsoup4, but most probably don’t realize that a core library that powers it, soupsieve, is effectively maintained by one person. In the spirit of the xkcd you linked, Isaac Muse could probably use some funding

GraphenOS Fdroid
Signal KDE Wikipedia Open street map

1. Are they useful and/or essential for you/your causes?
2. Is their funding model transparent?
3. Do they need more funds to hit their financial goal for sustaining themselves?

If all answers are “yes”, donate to them.

I don’t know if it needs funding but I think a good contender for the project referenced in the comic is NTP the Network Time Protocol. It’s used in almost every computer in existence. Syncing up times over an unreliable network is an incredibly hard problem and basically only one person on the planet knows exactly how it works. And he’s set to retire. Or maybe he’s already retired. Been a while since I’ve read about that.

LibreOffice or other open source office suites. Rich word processors, spreadsheet, and slideshow software are seldom thought about but extremely important in the information age, and the duopoly of Microsoft and Google would like nothing more than to see the open source alternatives die so they can take full control of your documents.

Especially if you use Linux as a daily driver: KDE, GNOME, XFCE, Lxqt, other desktop environments. Unless you know how to do everything from the command line, they’re probably the things allowing you to use Linux at all. Think about how much funding Windows or Mac development gets, that’s because making a full graphical shell and suite of up to date system apps is difficult as fuck and they’re massive codebases that require constant maintenance. One could even argue that their development and maintenance is a bigger undertaking than the Linux kernel itself yet most Linux users never think about them, nor do they have the backing of large companies like the kernel does because pretty much all of them use Windows on their workstations even if their server infrastructure runs Linux. And high quality graphical environments are absolutely critical if we’re ever to have hope of Linux being adopted by the general public and not just developers and power users. If you use Linux as your main OS and have the cash to spare, considering tossing even a quarter of the cost of a Windows license you didn’t buy to your DE of choice and do your part in ensuring that DE stays usable in the future.

The Perl and Raku Foundation has seen a big drop in funding over the last decade

Understanding the Financials of The Perl and Raku Foundation

There’s an npm command that lists packages that need funding

npm fund

SFC (“Software Freedom Conservancy”) is doing good work on a legal front that may well result in a lot more consumer electronic devices (like smart TVs) having fully FOSS OSs available.

More info at https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html

Not sure if it’s directly related, but I donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). They’re quite active in the technology space and I feel that they also carry the FOSS ethos.

https://eff.org/

The ones you use. If you use KDE, Thunderbird, Gimp or whatnot you should consider donating to those specifically.

Still, don’t forget Wikipedia, it’s one of the greatest Open Source projects of all time.

One thing I found the hard way is that majority of backends for imagick, the suite that powers almost every file conversion and manipulation you see on the internet, are maintained by, at most, one person, if not abandoned completely. I’d say that’d be a good one to donate to, and from which most people would benefit from.

I donate to the one I’m using right now: https://join-lemmy.org/donate

Not money per se, I believe more hands are necesary to assist/succeed Werner Koch. He is doing a critical task for the internet, and last I read, he is the only one on it.