"Critical" projects and volunteer maintainers

It's unfortunate that that no micropayments system ever really got off the ground. At my work we use hundreds, maybe thousands of packages (especially if you include NPM). I've toyed with the idea of having my work donate to projects we depend on, but which ones? Debian is an easy one, and Python is used a lot, but what about the many many small packages used indirectly? Those are the ones that need support but it just isn't easily done, and perhaps impossible. You'd possibly spend 10 times the amount on administrative overhead than that you'd actually donate.

If it were as simple as simply donating some money to an entity with a list of packages to distribute to it might have a chance of happening.

(Of course, as soon as you start talking about money you get the discussion of how to divide it. Should big projects get more than small projects? Should active projects get more than idle feature complete ones? You'd probably have to provide options there too.)

What I try to do is to, if I find a bug, try to write a useful bug report and if possible include a patch. I feel it's the least I can do.