Donations are not a realistic source of income for open source maintainers. They do what they do for reasons other than money. Often, they are mission driven (d

Donations are not a realistic source of income for open source maintainers. They do what they do for reasons other than money. Often, they are mission driven (doing it because they want to achieve something) more than anything else. You can help maintainers by contributing code or even bug reports to the ecosystem wherever it makes sense to do so. When you are in a situation where you can contribute something by spending a little bit of extra time (e.g., on merging your changes,) then do it. Although I believe that maintainers are great and that they deserve to get paid for their work, the fact is they aren't getting paid and they don't expect to get paid.