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A New Year's Idea: Pay For Some Freedom
As you may have read the other day, the FreeBSD project is now taking donations via PayPal. And if you're in a clean, roots-UNIX kind of mood, the folks at OpenBSD and NetBSD (NetBSD PayPal) would probably also appreciate your goodwill, not to mention your money, hardware and time.
If you don't have a specific project in mind, but would like to donate some of your chunk of the time-money continuum to a worthy software undertaking, a good place to start is Software in the Public Interest. They can take both general donations as well as earmark for projects they support, like Berlin, Debian, GNOME and more. (Not into GNOME? KDE could use some assistance, including money, too.)
If you like the projects funded by the boxed-distribution makers (like paying for full-time work on endeavors like KOffice), you can do more than buy the box: Mandrake has recently formed something called the Mandrake Club as a gathering place for both people and funds.
To encourage (and reward) cross-platform goodness, supporting the Mozilla project is hard to beat. (This story was posted using a 9.7 build using the wonderful Modern theme.) Source of Mozilla wisdom Mozillazine could use some help paying for the switch to a new host, and to defray ongoing costs. Another good place to cast your perls is Yet Another Foundation, which supports the somewhat scrutable development of the not-so-scrutable Perl.
More generally, consider investing some money in organizations like the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Electronic Privacy and Information Center (EPIC), all of which help battle (in court and in the marketplace of ideas) the forces who wish to monitor and otherwise exert top-down control of your computer and everything to do with your on-line life.
Remember, with all of these projects, non-monetary contributions are welcomed as well -- if you can write or correct some online documentation, create test-cases to root out weaknesses, or create some pretty graphics to smooth the user experience, you can contribute. (Long-distance pizza deliveries to developers are also generally appreciated.) Teaching a coworker, classmate, parent or friend how to set up mailfilters on a Linux box, or how to edit photos in the GIMP, is a nice way to save them money, too. Making a difference locally might also mean contributing some time, money or hardware to help run local LUG events.
Note: Many of the organizations named above are set up as 501(c) charities; if you'd like to claim any charitable contributions as tax deductions, now's the time to get the postmark, at least if it's important to you for those donations to be on the current calendar year. For a few more ideas on ways to donate geekily this year, see Jack Bryar's Newsforge column with some more links.
And a Happy New Year's!
Couldn't this all be avoided by a good open source business model? Isn't that what we're really looking for here? I don't think a software company can run completely funded by donations.
Send transgaming some dough for the new year- not only are they improving DirectX under Linux, but other useful Win32 APIs. In time, Wine may be a fully-featured Windows emulator!
æeee!
You can also give to PerlMonks, using the appropriately named Offering Plate (they use Paypal but you can also just send a check).
Look, that's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em. (Terry Pratchett)
Of course it costs money, everything does.. so is free software really free for the end user.. Of course!!
So what can we do to make it all work out? If everyone does something in the community, everyone is getting something for free.. just as long as everyone does something good.
I try to do my part in it by developing a little software and bug fixing.
Why can't other people do the same and we can all have a free community??
I'm not sending money to companies as a 'charitable contribution'! Let them figure out their own way to make money if they want to run a business. The EFF is different, however, as I would expect them to fight for my civil rights to an extent, which should be free of limited control by 'shareholders.' I support businesses by using their stuff and maybe donating some time and energy to improving parts of their free products that I think need fixed or cleaned up, but I'm not Mr. Moneybags here.
yahoo is fairly reputable, and I don't think they have a surcharge... Never mind, they have transaction charge of 2.5% of the transaction amount plus $0.30
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
I support my free software by coding my own projects. I'm poor, too, so donate to me. Otherwise, I'd give up some money to my favorite OSS projects.
Here's some more of my comments on the OSS movement.
Zodiac Survey
I personally don't donate to ANY organization unless the overhead expenses are clearly stated in their donation literature. On SPI's site for example, I can't find any record of how much of donations go to administration or how much the leaders of the organization are paid.
I think a lot of people would be shocked by how corrupt a lot of high-profile organizations are, and how small the percentage of donations go to the intended receivers. If SPI or any other organization has nothing to hide, then let them state the facts so I know I'm not getting ripped off.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
If donations pay the bills, then I think things should stay the way they are. Hell, the FSF has been working almost entirely off of donations for over 15 years now. I'd say that makes it a fairly credible "business model".
For free software developers especially, paying the rent and getting food and clothing are really all that's needed. Beyond that, I don't think there's any reason to FORCE your customers into giving you money. I mean we're all amigos here, right? Theoretically we rarely need to be forcing each other to do anything.
If, on the other hand, working off donations isn't actually working, then there are other business models to consider, such as selling free software and support (see SuSE, Red Hat, Cygnus and others), or selling "special" products (see Ximian, your local prostitutes).
Damn, I just posted about this sort of thing. I guess I'll follow-up here, then:
... say, every one thousand dollars, or every month, whichever is reached last.
The only reason micropayments aren't working is greed. Yahoo's 2.5% is pretty reasonable; it's the extra thirty cents that kills the whole micropayment mechanism.
We need someone with deep pockets to come along and make his money not through direct charges, but through savvy money management.
Charge a 2% transaction charge, sure. That's a penny on every fifty-cent transaction. That's cool.
Next, don't transfer the money to the recipient for each and every charge. Only transfer the money when it's worth transferring
In other words, until your work collects a thousand bucks worth of payment, you don't get a dime. At the other end of the scale, if you're churning ten thousand a day, you don't get a penny until the end of the month.
The middleman is going to make his money by investing that money. A nice, safe fixed-income bond pays 2.5 to 3% these days. If you can get billion dollars of transactions sequestered away at those rates, you're going to make $20M in transaction charges + $30M in interest = a fifty million dollar business.
Now, granted, that's not a very good return on investment. But the point here isn't to get rich: it's to enable a revolutionary economy. The person who does this is going to have to be the kind of super-wealthy fellow who doesn't have a need to make piles of money. He's going to have to be the kind of guy who wants to make a big mark in history.
Micropayments will work, if we can find someone who will allow them to work for the benefit of the artists/programmers/creators. It'll never work if the middle-man is greedy.
--
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Unfortunately I do not have enough money to donate ca$h, but I still give food to the needing using http://www.thehungersite.com/.
Someone should start a similar service where one can donate bandwidth/hardware/etc by clicking and watching banners, similar to The Hunger Site.
That would be neat, I could add another good cause to my daily donation procedure.
I'd gladly click a daily banner if it'd help the guys down at OpenBSD.
-5!{
Every time a new release of OpenBSD is out I purchase it. Then I donate it to the local Library and write it off. I think this is a win win situation all around. If more people would do this, more people might experience a different OS other then Windows or MacOS.
I'm quite sure there's downsides to it. Who the hell is going to care if a politician announces he's going to push for public funding towards free software? as opposed to the usual pitches like education, social services (well in the UK at least), public transport and so forth.
And if you exempt software from market forces, quality IS going to go down the tube. Because we'll get fourty different office suites, a few thousand MP3 organising systems and toy window managers and programming languages and no central focus. Sorry folks, open source is all well and good, and on a small to medium scale it can work; I, for instance, use KDE, I think its architecture and homogeneous design is a testament to the capabilities of open source developers. But for every such gem there's going to be hundreds of time sinks. You're going to need a PHB in there somewhere to focus people into a cohesive unit, so that instead of implementing some weird Emacs mode, a developer can help with a database project, or an IPC framework or hell SOMETHING. And that the entire system functions as a unit too - Debian's probably the best distribution in terms of actually having an overall plan to it but it's really at what I see as the fundamental scalability limit.
For other examples, look at Linux. Great OS huh? yeah sure, but look at LKML. The old protracted bickering over which VM is better continues to grow. Statistics and patches and optimisations and forced commits all go on and yet there's no progress. The 2.4 tree is absolute shit - I run it on my home server and it crashes every few weeks. Every few weeks?? what the hell is this shit, Windows 98? I've seen better uptimes on Win2K boxes! A 2.2 box I admin over in the US that runs as an IRC server once hit 130+ days of uptime before it crashed due to a power outage. Isnt 2.4 supposed to be a stable tree?
Anyways, I digress. The point is there's things open source is good for, and there's things commercial software is good for; I like Linux and all but I dont buy all this Stallman zealotry about the whole thing. I'd be happier seeing a bound and chained Microsoft, but equally so I dont think stuff like, say, Oracle, could ever be the product of open source coders. Say what you will about the arrogance of Oracle's CEO or whatever, point is it's the best in the market, and unfortunately enterprise level apps still don't run anything open source on the high level because open source initiatives simply lack the resources to agressively develop something like this. Open source, however, does produce well engineered foundations, such as the GNU toolset, which is pretty much standard these days.
But, hey, what do I know. I'll be interested to see some counter-examples to this though.
Actually, the US government does currently have an artists' fund. It's called the National Endowment for the Arts. I wonder if anyone has ever thought of applying to them for a grant to develop free software. It'd be a great experiment, and if well-publicized, possibly a nice attention-getter for the cause.
last time i checked Patrick Volkerding and his staff were in serious trouble and started a fund as one of the first companies and though i hope they are doing a bit better now with Slack8 out and the store, and Sourceforge paying the traffic, i still believe they could use some boosters.
Patrick has been doing a wonderful work during the last years and why not help him keeping one of the first (and IMHO best) Linux Distributions up and running?
cu,
Lispy
A T1 goes for what, $900/mo? Electricity, lease payments, repairs, etc., all add up to some monthly expense. The transaction costs could easily be in the $1.00 to $3.00 range per CD distributed. And, of course, you load Yahoo!s $0.30 into the front end amount, ending up with about $1.30 to $3.30 per ISO image. It covers the Yahoo! expense, and it may even be enough to keep FreeBSD afloat.
Oh, and the problem with your lump-sum solution above is that Visa will want transaction fees on every donor to middleman transaction as well as on every middleman to recipient transaction. So, your middleman organization has to make sure that they hold on to the user's account long enough to get a whole lump amount from each credit card. It might be a better solution to have a web counter at the destination site that you register with; one that promises not to withdraw money until the user uses more than $X worth of services (or maybe monthly, whichever comes first.) And that comes with its own raft of fraud issues, too, but that's not a huge deal for a mostly voluntary payment scheme...
The biggest thing is I don't want any volunteer organization collecting my Visa info. Just look at the attack tree! You have volunteer groups holding either Visa account information or tokens that are worth lots of cash; you have a payment website to secure and insure; and you still have to pay Visa lots of money to play. It'd take a bank's worth of money just to create a middleman site like this. FreeBSD may do better just to issue their own Visa cards.
Sorry, but I just think the financial risks involved to everyone concerned in the middleman scheme would pretty much prevent it from taking off.
John
John
There is no piracy in Open Source. I know you know that, but it's an important point.
The idea I had was to set up a site where people who want features or functionality added to some piece of open source software could post their requests along with a "bid" which would be held in escrow (in interest-bearing accounts) for whoever fulfilled the requirements. Requestors could pool their bids to make it more worthwhile for whoever decided to take up the project. Ideally, the site would be able to cover costs using the interest earned on the bids.
Obviously, this idea could be expanded to include links to many OSS projects and (ideally) their dependencies in an easily searched/browsed format. Sort of a one-stop OSS deal.
Anyway, that's the skeleton of my idea. Unfortunately I don't have the time or resources to do it myself. If anyone's interested, the email address above is valid. According to SBC I can get 6M DSL at my residence, so I can provide a physical location (assuming they'd allow hosting, although I honestly can't think what else I would do with all that bandwidth).
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I didn't mention VISA at all. I'm not sure why you do.
I also neglected to mention a further money-making part of this venture: the payee's money pool.
In my part of the world, banks generally waive the transaction/account fees if you have $1000 (sometimes $5000) in the account at all times during the month. Dip below, and they nail you. Keep it above, and they pay you a pittance in interest.
For the micro/small payment system to work, the middleman will need to set a deposit boundry. I think it should be $50. If you dip below $50, a surcharge is going to be applied to your transactions... perhaps an extra dollar charge, in addition to the payment you've made. It'll provide hefty incentive to keep a good bit of money in the account.
I think most people will be comfortable with having about $100 floating in their account.
Thus, with a million subscribers, the middle-man will have an additional $100M to play with. That'll be another $3 million of investment profit.
Plus you can bet that at any given time, a few percent of the users will let their accounts go below $50, giving the middle-man yet more revenue.
There are also some value-added services that could be provided to the recipients of these payments. Many of the recipients are going to be a group of people: hardly ever is an artist or programmer working entirely alone. These groups are going to need to distribute their money to the members. Our middle-man can do that for a nominal fee. Shazam, more bucks come rolling in.
Again, I repeat: this is going to require a selfless super-rich "donor" who has grown past the need to make more money, and now wishes to do something that will revolutionize the way we transact business with creative individuals. It's got a lousy rate of return, in a strictly dollars-and-cents mindset... but it's got a fantastic return, in terms of revolutionizing how we reward the creative people in our society.
--
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Free software isn't about getting something for free; it's about the freedom to modify programs to do what you want them to do, not what some arbitrary programmer in a distant company wants you to do. It's about freedom -- not about saving money (although that does appear to be a fringe benefit).
everybody's trying their hardest to fit free software into various old and new business models. then, when it seems impossible, they complain that such a business couldn't possibly be profitable. i think what most people are missing out on is that, for the first time in a while, we're able to enrich our own lives by contributing a bit of time, effort or resources (ie, bandwidth) here and there. there's so many of us that it doesn't take much to make a difference. in exchange, we get great, free software. i don't know why people need to fit dollar signs into everything.
when the rain comes, they run and hide their heads. they might as well be dead.
I would have to agree with you.
I am not a coder, and am thus immune to the female-repelling prowess of geekdom. My wonderfully beautiful wife and I beleive that today's society has too much vested in the wrong aspects of itself.
The heros in this world are pop stars and actors and arrogant hockey players, people who really only contribute to selfish, shallow morals. The additude of "do less, get payed more" is the moto of the new millenium.
I wish men, women and children would learn that the real heros in today's world are the scientists, engineers, programmers, thinkers or all kinds. These are the people who make the world turn, give the bloated western world the toys it needs to consume, the entertainment it needs to absorb, run the systems that control the money they spend.
If all of geekdom decided to stop working for a day, 1 day, the world would stop.
"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake."...Tyler Durden
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
> ...To make up the difference, the government will give you a rebate of $1,500....
Couple of details here:
- that applies to US tax law, as well as what I'm saying here. Your tax laws in your country or planet may vary. Will vary.
- Charities go onto Schedule A. There's a big, um, deductible thingee in the way, like the first idunnohowmuch doesn't count. If you own a house and pay mortgage, the interest also goes on Schedule A, so you're probably way past the deductible thingee. If you paid a zillion dollars to doctors for your cancer treatments last year, you might also be past. If you're an average person renting an apartment, your charities might score you Zero on your tax return.
- many US states have state income tax, too, which will add a few (ten?) percent to your tax rate, for the above calculation. On your state's version of Schedule A. With its own inscrutible rules, that might blah blah blah....
- If you have a business, you might be able to call it a biz expense. If not, it's a longshot.
- If you forget until after Jan 1, try postdating the check. Works for me. Give or take, it all comes out in the wash anyway, you deduct this year or next year, whatever, uncle sam gets their bux. UNLESS your tax situation changes A LOT from 2001 to 2002, in which case blah blah blah...
- Consult your accountant. If you don't have one, get one. He or she already knows the stuff you will spend hours trying to learn by yourself, even if you have turbo tax. And, far better than I do or ecampbel or any other tax amateur on slashdot. Like, they never call them "deductible thingees", and they never say "blah blah blah".
Marketing-driven companies end up over-marketing their products. Engineering-driven companies end up over-engineering
If you are lucky enough to have stock that has gone up in value (particularly founder's stock that has in effect a near-zero basis) you can get a double tax deduction in many cases for donating it rather than money.
The reason is you get to deduct the full value of the stock as a charitable donation, and you never pay the capital gains tax on it you would have paid if you sold it.
You need to have had it for a year. Contact a tax advisor for the full scoop.
If you do more than a tiny amount of charitable giving you can also set up a donor-advised fund (there is probably one in your area, do a web search). There you give stock to the fund (double deduction) and then have it dole out money to your favourite charities as you like it.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Seattle Community Network accepts donations through helping.org. There is no transaction fee as all costs are paid for by the AOL Time Warner Foundation. If any of these projects are 1) actually charities and 2) reading this, check out helping.org or some similar service. It stinks less than Amazon.
.NOT project and see what they say about reading non-published MS memos.
(off topic) And to those who say we need to be equal, involved partners in the development of free software, get a clue. Some people can code, some people can pay. I doubt you've contributed as much to Linux as, say, Linus, or as much to Emacs as RMS (not that you'd notice extra code in Emacs.) Should you limit your usage to the level of your involvement? What about your grandma? If she can't code, should she be allowed to use Linux?
Others can't be allowed to help at all. Should a Microsoft employee not be allowed to use FreeBSD? I guarantee you that FreeBSD wouldn't want someone who has access to NT internals submitting code to their project. If you doubt this, check out the GNU
Why did you lump the EFF in with the FSF? They have little in common.
IMHO anyone who values his/her civil liberties is already a member of EFF. (If you're not, please get your credit card ready before going to their web site.) They don't write software.
I happen to think that the FSF does good work too, and deserves to be much higher up your list of developers of useful software. "Linux" wouldn't exist without the FSF. But a typical Windows user probably wouldn't care - whereas civil liberties concern everyone.
"All those in favor of losing their rights, do nothing."
I dont know how many of you will get down here but a specific programmer comes to mind who I'm sure would appriciate the donation. I dont think he has a paypal link but I bet if you e-mail him (I think I will just have to do so myself) he'd tell you where you could send your donation.
Muhri! www.muhri.net, I am not he but he is the author of several open source projects of which are very widely used. gkrellm, skipstone, pronto...any of those ring a bell? And IMHO He's done a very good job, keeping all of his code very modulated, lightweight and extreamly becoming of unix tools for as far as X11 applications go.
I wish everybody else would think dozens of small tools rather than one very large tool, but for some reason GUI Userlands are slowly but surely killing that kind of development off even in the opensource world.
BlueEDU is building a Linux Distribution only for the school systems. It will not be sold only distributed to schools. They are pushing to move Linux into the classroom by making it easier to use for people ages 5+ they can really use your help with donations to allow them to go pick up cheap old hardware (like the schools have) in order to fully test the distribution before they distribute it Check here for more information
But if I had any money they would certainly be donated to the Xiph.org Foundation
Free Software is certainly a good thing, and a worthy cause, but open formats for exchange of ideas, thoughs and arts is even more important. Without it, me may end up in a situation where an Evil Corp[tm] can control what you can say.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
If a decent proportion of those of us who use free software were to leave some money to free software organisations in our wills then it would generate a significant income stream. Many charities get most of their funding through legacies from those who've benefited from them (e.g. Macmillan Cancer Nurses), and perhaps we should bequest money to, for example, the Free Software Foundation if we've benefited from free software through our lifetimes.
If you haven't got a will, then your New Year's Resolution should be to make one, and to remember free software in it. Statistically, sadly, a fair number of you who are reading this message will die in 2002, so if a good proportion of us make bequests to free software bodies then they will get quite a bit of income next year.
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
Although it's not an OSS/FS coding project, iComm has always run on GNU software, operates on a strictly volunteer basis, accepts charitable donations -- and most important, exists only to give nonprofit groups free webspace, email addresses and majordomo mailing lists.
Their charitable receipts are only good in Canada (pity, eh?) but they help lots of US-based NPOs, including Amnesty USA.
-Patrick
disclaimer: iComm founder, but no longer involved
So what will it cost me to get Slashcode sent to me in a nice #006666 green box complete with documentation, a /. beanie and 1000 hours of AOL free* to host my site?
* Subject to terms and license agreement. Some restrictions may apply. Void where prohibited. Offer not valid in Holland, MI.