Author here:
I know several people and also companies who would like to support Open Source financially, but don’t know how to do it in a fair way. Usually, there is just one approach, pick the most important library/project you depend on and donate some money to them. I asked myself if there is a simple method to support more maintainers with one donation, especially those who are further down the dependency chain and, thus, lack visibility. If you want to donate, for example, 100$ to 100 libraries, it is almost impossible to do it easily. You have to investigate for every single project if they accept donations, what platform they use for it, split the money, pay in the worst case 100 times transaction fees (credit card, bank transfer fees), and finally initiate the transactions.
I envision that you can donate on one platform and the donation is transparently and automatically distributed to all maintainers your project depends on. On the contributors’ side, this means that even if you are a small library down the dependency chain and don’t usually get a lot of visibility, you receive a small amount of the donation. I built a small mock up to demonstrate how it could work ... https://recursive.gives
As there are a lot of Open Source enthusiasts here, I would like to know if you think that it can work or if you have any other suggestion to tackle the problem.
Why do the devDependencies gets less attention than the "normal" dependencies?
In my case, it does not matter if the dependency was added to "dev" or "normal", because I just compile JavaScript and CSS to a minified version. All dependencies are needed in the build process only.
I would recomment not to differentiate between runtime dependencies and dev dependencies.
How do you legally distribute financial contributions? Who will be eligible to receive funding for work on a particular project? Who figures out the tax issues across jurisdictions? How do you become a relevant site representing such projects?
I am not saying it cannot be done. It definitely can, and the more options we have the better. Sites like https://www.opencollective.com are trying. Github has a bunch of new Sponsorship features. They have the audience.
Sites like https://www.libaries.io and https://www.repology.org are building dependency graphs. There are other places which can help to identify the recursive structure you are after.
Fiscal sponsorship entities like https://www.sfconservancy.org and https://www.techcultivation.org, apache.org etc are trying to tackle some of the issues to legally represent projects (and receive donations for them).