I would advocate an additional method of supporting open source: contributing. Doesn’t even have to be features. Bug fixes or docs are amazing. Heck even opening really good issues where it’s clear the dev spent time getting a good reproduction. Daniel is a full time maintainer who would benefit from additional income. Many small projects have maintainers that a few dollars might be helpful but help would be more helpful.

I went to some open source confs to promote a book I wrote (https://howtoopensource.dev) and free service (https://www.codetriage.com) and asked people working at booths for large companies if they can contribute to open source at their day job. Only one person had a positive example and in that case their team was literally blocked on the fix and there was no workaround. The rest seemed confused about why they should be spending work time to report issues or fix bugs. Some genuinely didn’t realize that was helpful and that “contributing to open source” doesn’t just mean releasing and maintaining your own code.

So yes, please fund the software you use, also time and attention is valuable too.

Last tip: If you want to make a habit of it, get it tracked like regular work. “Hey, is feature X done, can we move this card over?” …”Actually I still need to report an upstream issue before we are totally done, I’ll make another work item for it and get it checked off today”. If you feel like you would get pushback for that, then start smaller, by filing issues and talking about it after the fact. Most other engineers and quite a few managers see this as going above and beyond for your job.

How many of them are from profitable studios? Most of the stuff on steam isn’t going to be from big household names.

>And how many of them are donating to or sponsoring the cURL project?

A lot of them are likely using it as part of a game engine that they pay for, those game engines should be supporting the curl project, assuming you believe they have an obligation to do so.