A Simple Way to Thank the Open Source Projects You Depend On

So many things we developers create are only possible because someone released their work as open source. Their effort allows us to focus on our features – not only in our side projects, but also at our (paid) work. We can use their open source projects for free and create great things, often without the smallest sign of gratitude.

A short while ago I heard of a little Rust project called cargo thanks. You add it to your project, run it and it goes through your dependencies, finds their GitHub account and stars the project:

Starring a project needs next to no effort and shows at least a tiny bit of appreciation. A step further goes the Ruby Gem thanks, that matches your installed Gems to a list of donation pages:

Little helper like cargo thanks exist for Node.js and PHP as well. Unfortunately, there is no such helper for .Net (the NuGet package dotnet-thanks only prints Thanks to the command line). Please leave a comment if you know one for .Net or for other languages that I should add.

Starring a repository or donating money are just two possibilities to thank all those who work endless hours so that we can build on top of their work.
Maybe we find a few minutes around the Christmas holidays to thank those people who created all those great (open source) projects we use every day.