You can't live without a heart, but most people don't get cancer, is it ethical for me to donate to the American cancer society but not the American heart association because Cancer is built on the heart?

No it's my donation I'll donate where I want. If I find joy in donating to a small oss dev instead of a strategic donation to a well organized large one then that's what I do.

Ok, I wasn't confused before but now I am.

Look, all I'm saying is if some javascript developer guilts me into donating to open source, the right thing for me to do (I feel) would be to start from the top of the open source chain.

* Operating system * Code versioning * Container system * CI/CD etc...

It's a long way down before I get to "standard - the javascript linter configuration file".

That's a bit like arguing that Bernie Sanders should give up his housing in Vermont, because No True Socialist would own a house. A good action which is done with good intentions is wholely good, regardless of other good or bad actions that may occur in the same space.

You could donate to all of those projects, but there's no moral imperative to visit them all in order of importance, just because they all played a part.

A permissive license is permission to behave otherwise, and just like Open Source contributions are made voluntarily, your support in kind should be on a voluntary basis too.

Yea I didn't phrase that correctly. I tried to address it elsewhere but it just seems odd that these tiny projects are making so much noise over money while these larger, more integral ones have been going on for decades, providing much more value without turning your install process into a gofundme campaign.

FWIW, I agree. I don't remember the name of the NPM module from the article I just read, and I sure wouldn't have paid them any money if I had been alerted as part of their experiment.

I only donate to obscure Debian derivatives though, so...

>Lots of projects use Debian and docker, etc...is it even ethical to donate to an npm package before donating to the dozens of free tech layers node sits on top of?

Are you asking whether it is ethical to do something that the authors have explicitly said is OK?