How effective are them at this? Which high importance projects have they financed?

Legitimate questions, I'm not implying anything here

There are some organisations/groups which seem to be effective in actually paying people.

There is a group of Debian developers that collect funding and pay Debian developers/maintainers to maintain LTS for Debian releases:

https://www.freexian.com/en/services/debian-lts.html

https://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/Freexian+LTS/

The FreeBSD Foundation also hires developers to do actual work:

https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2016-04-2016-06.h...

https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/what-we-do/projects/#curre...

However, I think such initiatives are typically highly underfunded. Like OpenSSH/{Open,Libre}SSL/GnuPG, everyone uses the software, few companies/individuals chip in in a significant way.

Getting a copy of "The Debian Administrator's Handbook" also helps support Raphaël Hertzog and Roland Mas keep doing good work.

I purchased a recent copy of the book (covering Debian 8), and while there are things I'd like more details about, I find it a good resource to have on hand.

GCC and Emacs spring to mind :-)

I'm unaware of any Emacs or GCC dev being paid by the FSF. From what I recall, the Emacs maintainers do it as a hobby, and the GCC maintainers are employed by the likes of Red Hat to work on it. However, if what you're implying is true, I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong :).

Perhaps not at the moment, but you can read all about the woes Zawinski had with the guy GNU hired to work on Emacs that led to the XEmacs fork...

Interesting read https://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html

There's a redirect to imgur if the referrer is hacker news.

Not many people other than JWZ can pull that off without pissing off people. Reminds of the time when MSN.com hot-linked to some poor guy's website in a front-page article. What did the guy do? Replace the image with a copy of the original goatse photo.

FSF collects money for infrastructure etc.

Generally the GNU project maintainers are not paid by the FSF. Mostly they're paid through the likes of Red Hat etc., with varying overlap between day job and maintainership