If even half of the professionals who use open source products would budget even small amount (like $100) to distribute between their favorite open source proje

If even half of the professionals who use open source products would budget even small amount (like $100) to distribute between their favorite open source projects per year, we would not have this conversation. Seriously, Is it so hard to spend less than hour per year (around Christmas maybe) to voluntarily subscribe to the tools you like. Investment to learn some software tool at expert level can easily be $10,000 - $30,000 when you distribute the cost of learning all the details over several years. This has lot to do with the reason why people start using open source products. They are not just looking if the code is open source just now. What they want is community that guarantees the long life and continued development that justifies the continued investment to learn and keep up with the tool. I have invested significant amount of personal time for learning to use stuff like Gnu Emacs, Linux, coreutils, C, R, Matlab, Common Lisp in general and SBCL in particular etc. Investment to these things pays dividends that can be measured in significant money. It looks like communities involved are alive and work towards goals I like, so I donate.