Sure, point taken. I'm not saying don't give to charity or volunteer for a good cause, I just question if contributing to open source software is really an effe

Sure, point taken. I'm not saying don't give to charity or volunteer for a good cause, I just question if contributing to open source software is really an effective way to go about doing good. If the project you contribute to has some special positive impact on the world, then probably, but if you're just contributing to the general software ecosystem, then it's hard to see how that directly benefits anyone other than, at best, a bunch of well off software developers (though that's not clear to me either) and at worst, only benefitting profit seeking corporations which we would normally expect to fund work being done to run their business.