This argument is not new: it happens also with regular charities. You could donate to the charity with the highest impact (measured by QALYs per dollar or whate

This argument is not new: it happens also with regular charities. You could donate to the charity with the highest impact (measured by QALYs per dollar or whatever) but a lot of people donate less efficiently. Sometimes they even get criticised for it. But maybe an inefficient donation is still better than no donation, and should be lauded to encourage more people to donate, however efficiently? At first I was going to suggest, that someone set up an effective-altruism-for-open-source type of project, that ranks open source projects by how efficiently they can use donated money. But then I realised also that would fall for the same trap. Why donate to give libcurl higher revenue when you can donate to save people from malnutrition? (On the other hand, you could argue that the productivity gains afforded by libcurl would allow us (humans) to allocate more resources to victims of malnutrition. So what do I know.)