They’re facilitating crowd funding for projects and providing a common, easily discovered and easily used interface to do so, with a relatively high degree of t

They’re facilitating crowd funding for projects and providing a common, easily discovered and easily used interface to do so, with a relatively high degree of trust that a given transaction will be handled and distributed as advertised. This is not much different from Kickstarter etc (all of whom take a cut), other than having a much lower barrier to entry and probably a much longer tail of small contributions. Yes, of course you’re right that they’ll profit. Yes, it’s probably even profit-motivated to some extent. But it’s also a much needed public good. I’d rather it not benefit GitHub/Microsoft too, but if it meaningfully improves compensating people for open source work, that’s worlds better than not doing anything.