I'm very open to the possibility that I went about it the wrong way, but I don't really know what I should have done differently. Maybe it could have worked if I had done a lot more evangelizing -- I admittedly didn't do much, but what I did do was so poorly received that I gave up.
However, the donation is about helping poor children in Uganda, not about running the project.
The costs of keeping them current adds up surprisingly quickly.
In fact, it adds up so quickly that my company has a standing policy in place that we will do _whatever_it_takes_ to have any pull requests we need in an upstream project integrated in order to avoid us having to maintain a fork.
What this means in practice usually is that getting the pull request accepted becomes the primary focus for one of the senior engineers for the 1-2 weeks it takes to get it into a shape that the project maintainer can work with.
As you can imagine this is also expensive, but it's a fraction of the cost of maintaining our own fork of the project.
So - here's my offer to Libré, Free and Open Source Software maintainers everywhere:
I will _gladly_ pay the cost of 1 week of a senior engineer's salary to have you accept my pull request if you are prepared to either:
1) do the quality control work yourself or…
2) hold the hand of one of my junior engineers while they learn how to do it.
I too would gladly pay one dollar for a hundred dollars bill.