That sounds nice in theory, but if I'm running a business, unless I have more money than I know what to do with, I can only donate so much to open source development. Let's say my entire application is written using Vue.js. In that case, regardless of how many little utility libraries I use, I want to make sure that the vast majority of my contribution goes to the Vue.js contributors because Vue has, by far, the most significant impact on my business, and I'd like to make sure I can continue to depend on it in the foreseeable future. In contrast, that utility that title-cases strings that I use all over the place is great, but I wouldn't be heartbroken if it didn't exist anymore.

> If dependency X is a pithy trivial thing that doesn't deserve your funds, and you care so much, then write your own into a utils file. The reality is, you didn't and you're using someone else's work.

If the author of the utility felt that way, they could have given it a commercial license and sold it to me. I know this makes me sound cold, but open source authors know the deal they're getting, and nobody should expect to get paid any significant amount for their contributions. From a business perspective, it makes sense to fund anything you would be in real trouble without, because your money increases the odds that those projects continue to grow and be improved/maintained.

Having said all of that, I still find StackAid to be a great idea, and if I owned a (profitable) business, I could see myself using it in addition to larger donations to specific projects that my business depends on. That would be a great way to distribute the funds to all of the projects I use while still focusing on a small handful of key pieces of software.

In classical-econ I think they call it the water vs diamonds problem. People just have an intuitive sense that some abstract absolute-value matters more than subjective-value, or additional effort should be rewarded more than less-effort. These are wrong, because the real price is about the tradeoff one must make on the margin. The value something has is always about the alternatives I can take - to go to another supplier, to implement something myself, to forgo, etc ...

>If dependency X is a pithy trivial thing that doesn't deserve your funds, and you care so much, then write your own into a utils file.

I don’t have a choice with sub-dependencies of packages I do care about.

I think that's kinda the point: you don't get to control every little detail. Your funds get spread across the dependencies you use. Those funds then get spread across the transitive dependencies, recursively. Maybe what's trivial to you saves the maintainer of one of your dependencies a bunch of time, and warrants some contribution. That's up to them, not you. And in this scenario, if you remove that dependency top level, while it still might get some cut transitively, it gets far less, so you've still made a statement.