I’m an avid proponent of free and open-source software (FOSS). All the open-source services and applications I offer are of course free but I accept donations (i.e. donation-ware). The inflow of PayPal donations is very moderate but that’s alright. Fortunately I don’t have to live off of that – I would have long starved to death. I see every donation primarily as a token of appreciation of what I contribute to the open-source world.

Recently I wondered where the most generous users of my NodeMCU build service came from. It would also be interesting to correlate generosity with site usage I thought.

Generosity

As you can see nearly half of all donations, not by numbers but by $, are from the US and Germany. To me that isn’t much of a surprise as those two have been leading the usage ranking more or less from the beginning. The next three positions are English-speaking countries as well.

Usage and correlation

However, the US and Germany are responsible for only a quarter of all builds so far. That means that both have a very positive “generosity-usage” quotient. Other countries with  a positive quotient are Australia, Canada and the Netherlands. While they are among the top-10 donors they don’t generate enough load to be among the top-10 users. Countries with a negative quotient are Russia, Poland and China. This does of course not take into account that the average income in those countries is lower than in others.