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Money can be a strong incentive, but it can also cause trouble in open source project, as Debians "Dunc Tank" project showed.

Therefore I'd advise only to donate to projects that already accept donations, and clearly show that on their homepage. Otherwise your well-meant action might actually stir greed and envy, and thus could be counter-productive.

Doesn't seem like dunc-tank has done anything since '06, I might be mistaken but here's their press release
http://www.dunc-tank.org/press.html

Debian ships When It's Ready.

But for those of us who are holding our breath for release time, a good and rough indicator of when it will ship is the number of release critical bugs. When the number hits zero, Debian is (almost?) ready. Since the etch freeze was announced about a week ago, the number of release bugs has wavered around 130, with a slight downward trend. This is the stock market of the free software world. :-) The etch freeze means that no packages can move down from unstable (sid) to the current testing (etch) automatically anymore (normally, packages in unstable are automatically moved down to testing by a script if no bugs are filed against them for some time, several days, iirc). Packages can still be moved from unstable to testing, but only manually if it's clear that they are stable enough for the next release.

The dunk-tank drama in the Debian mailing lists is old news. Yes, some developers expressed concerns about the dunc-tank project, but I would hardly call this "frozen development". Developers are working hard to get the Debian release. I estimate January or February at the latest will be beer and pizza party time for all the Debian developers that have produced the largest binary free GNU/Linux distribution amongst which so many other distros depend.

Personally, I'm very excited. I'm not sure how much truth there is in this, but Ubuntu has probably put pressure in Debian to more timely releases, and this release will be much more in time than the previous sarge release was. I've been given permission to install Debian in 20 workstations of our local network, and I'm waiting for the stable release and the renowned Debian quality and security to do so. I'll probably be tracking the next testing release after I install them, though, since testing works well for desktop use and workstations.

• Must meet Debian's usual standard of releasing "when it's ready"

This site (Dunc Tank) has to be the downright worst attempt at fund raising I've ever seen in my life.

The ironic thing is, it's representative of far too many open source documentation projects. Not that anyone in their right mind would think you need documentation for a monatary contribution. Seriously, people don't give a crap abotu wading through a few pages of latex2html just to kick $5 (or $100 for that matter) to a decent project only to find out they need to email some guy and pledge the doe.

Here's a tip, try this out for size:

Of course, I'm sure Debian probably doesn't want money from people too impatient to RTFDD (read teh fucking donation documentation)

If your going to ask for money on a website, have it so people have 1-2 clicks to contribute.. Even if its pledges, have it so the pledges are processed when the project is approved.. Right now they are essentially turning away thousands in contributions, especially with this type of publicity.