Yeah, it's not much. But the publicity and the methodology and the possibility of others doing the same is more impactful than just the financial resources the author had.
Thanks. That's a start experiment - I am going to donate more using this approach in the future and hope that other people will join me in this non-profit initiative.
While any particular donation I made to OSS maintainers is small, it seems important that the recipients get more attention and maybe will be less likely to burn out in the future. For instance, some of them (btw, from Nebraska!) did not receive anything for 18 years of contributing to OSS before last week: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7269812...?