Hi,
Today I am shutting down my project about donations which focused on helping open source projects and authors of free content accept recurring payments.
I would like to use this opportunity to open a discussion about open source funding. What I have learned over this time is that donations rarely work sustainable for open source projects. Users should really-really like the project to support it. And this is quite a hard job to keep people engaged over time. SupporterHQ was not particularly successful at this. Several competitors do a better job. We collected a list of competitor services in an awesome list https://github.com/60devs/awesome-crowdfunding-services.
How do you feel about donating money to open source projects in 2018? Do you regularly donate, occasionally or never?
I donate to one project, but I think you're right about needing to feel close to the project. I think more important than that to me is feeling like I know who the people are that are working on the project, and it's kinda hard to know people when your only interaction is typically through pull requests. The project I donate to is also incredibly transparent about where the money is going which helps.
Is it common for companies to donate to open source projects? There's a lot more money there than with individual users, and I know loads of tech companies are making use of an open source project or two.