I'm the developer and maintainer of several open-source projects, including:

• PySTDF
• Hockeypuck
• Ormesh

I'm generally not paid to work on these projects. My current employer operates and contributes to Hockeypuck, but my contributions and support for it fall outside my regular duties. They're more likely to have other developers fix business-critical issues, than to let me work on it.

When you fund these projects, this focuses my attention on them and prioritizes your interests. Anyone can ask for arbitrary features or open issues and it costs nothing to do so. From my perspective, time, energy, focus are limited resources and I have to prioritize. I've learned the hard way that these resources need to be budgeted wisely to keep a healthy life balance and still enjoy these projects I've started.

Funding is a strong signal that cuts through the noise of "free". When someone cares enough about a feature or issue enough to pay to see it improve, that gets my attention and jumps the queue. It also offsets operating costs and can improve the project in other ways. In the case of Hockeypuck, funding could support operations costs for reference keyservers, a project DNS name, etc. In the case of PySTDF, I could contract a Python-savvy full-stack developer to build visualization and yield analysis tools.

My consulting company, Cmars Technologies LLC, will be handling contributions for tax and liability reasons as an incubator, until a project scales to the point where it really needs it's own governing entity.