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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)
Free ways of helping are many much better than just £$ ways. Many small and new project need testers and especially _FEEDBACK_. If you have an idea that would make the little software project better, share it with thedevelopers. If you find a bug, make sure that you report it. If you think the programs great, tell that to the developer. I mean many projects die, because the developer thinks that the project isn't important. And if you really are feeling like helping, you could do graphics, sounds or programming. Everybody can help out in this effort.
IVAN Nethack is not the king anymore.
I think one of the best and easiest way to support Free Software is to buy a box set (or "retail version" if you like) of your favourite Free Software (distros, apps, games).
;-)
Sure you can download an iso and burn as many copies as you like, and sure you "don't need no stinking manual". But by buying retail version you are saying directly to the developers, publishers and retailers that you use their software and like it enough to buy a copy. (And you can write it off as business software purchases when you file your tax
Plus your box set is great for lending out to friends & newbies (much more impressive than your blank CD-R). Or put it beside your computer at work (and let anyone borrow it), to subtly promote Free Software without being an anti-M$ nazis about it.
Codeala - Just another mindless drone
I just got a direct mailing from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asking for special holiday donations. For a gift of $50US or more, they'll throw in a T-Shirt with their new logo. I couldn't find the offer on their website, so I suppose it's limited to members. Anyway, I need a different outfit for work; the boss gets visibly upset whenever I wear my Computerworld "Shark Tank" T-shirt.
So the EFF will be getting my fifty bucks, because I figure if free software gets made illegal, there won't be anybody left for the rest of you to donate to.
Like my stuff? Sure, its free -- but rent isn't.
Shamelessly begging for pocket change in the post-dot-com economy,
Bowie J. Poag
Freenet has been taking donations for a while, and has already used some of these funds to hire two developers to work full-time on the project for two months each (for less money than they could earn at Starbucks). The project is nearing its next major release, 0.5, and could really use your help financially to allow more developers to devote more of their time to the project.
Of course it costs money to develop and distribute software. Its good to see an Slashdot article highlighting this.
But more intriguing is the suggested solution. So there are various funds I can contribute to that will renumerate some or all of the people working on free software. That's interesting but surely it has a fatal flaw.
By pooling donations to be split amongst projects you are diminishing a lot of the power of your money. When I pay for a software package I am saying that I want this software package, not one of the many alternatives I could have bought. The one I chose may have features I want, it may have a better UI for me, it may be more reliable, it may be more compatible.
I vote with my money and that gives me a small but significant voice in which software gets the resources to continue to grow.
I don't want to give up this power. Software should conform to my needs as the end user. The market mechanism is an extremely good way for me to express my needs in a way that the software developers will take seriously.
This is a Good Thing [tm].
Why circumvent the market principle? Why disenfranchise users in this way?
Yes, I am advocating selling software to cover its cost of development, distribution and continued production. You know, like we've always done for software and pretty much all other goods and services. Yay for selling good software for a fair price.
Sailing over the event horizon
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.
There is no reason free software developers shouldn't get paid. The problem is that we have no system in place to conduct the process.
Imagine, for instance, if instead of all these companies paying billions to Microsoft for Office, if just a few million was spent paying free software developers to make a comparable product instead. I would be willing to bet that the resulting product from the free software developers would be of better quality, despite the huge difference in the amount of money involved. The moral of the story? Free software developers could work just like normal programmers (high salaries and all), and develop public works for all to enjoy. There is no reason we shouldn't get paid.
Donations are a good first step, but it should not end there. I want big fat office buildings full of free software developers, maybe publically government funded (like the Artists and Painters of yore), or perhaps kick-started by a company with money. The money needs to come first, then the product. That's the only way it would work and make sense.
My perfect world:
- company A needs a product, so they contact the FSF or something.
- FSF solicits the concept to other companies that might be interested (company A could do this also, petition-style)
- All the companies pitch in money (up front) to the FSF to have the software developed.
- The finished product is put in a museum, where all can make copies.
As far as I can tell, there is absolutely no downside to this system, other than that the older companies selling software will get the shaft.
Another problem you might think of is that you have to wait for the software to be developed. This is no different than the current system in place. My hope is that this proposed system would be used for all software in the future, not just as counter-projects to MS software (would still be worthwhile though).
Donate NOW, before the New Year, and not only will those non-profit organizations benefit, but you have another itemized tax deduction for the year 2001. It's a smart move!
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
I believe that the best way to help your favorite open-source project is to get involved. I can think of countless times that I've heard people whine, moan, and complain about the fact that the open-source application $FOO doesn't have feature $BAR; but the person who wants $BAR isn't willing to either code it or pay someone to.
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).
Even if you don't code, chances are you can get someone involved in the project to write something for you by taking care of something they need. Documentation is the first thing that comes to mind; many open-source projects are sadly lacking in this department, and a well-written manual is worth a mountain of coder time. You can also help to provide server space and/or bandwitdh for the project, or to donate hardware for the coders-in-question to use.
The point is that free software is a community effort; and if you aren't willing to be an equal participant of that community, you really don't have much of a say.
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I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
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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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
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 fully expect to be flamed, moderated down, and generally discredited for this comment, but someone needs to say it, because it's important. Money? To heck with money. I have a job that pays for my food and housing and computer. I'll write free software whether you give me money or not. Money will not make a difference to me or make my New Year happier. Having a woman pay attention to me would.
The world is full of volunteers who work tirelessly to write free software, defend the public good in the copyright wars, and promote technical education for everyone, all without asking anything in return. A great many of these volunteers are frustrated, lonely, young heterosexual men. You aren't a techie, but you want to help? Wonderful. You can donate money, but it isn't what we really want. You can go write some documentation, but actually, that's a lie, because really you do have to be a techie in order for the results to be worthwhile. What can you do that's actually possible and would make a difference?
Go find someone who'll appreciate you, and let them know in a very personal way that you respect and admire what they do. Date a geek tonight.
The same logic can and should apply to geeks who aren't male heterosexuals, and nothing in this response should be taken to limit the application, blah, blah, blah, etc. That's not the point.
1. Software is not a zero-sum game. New software tends to increase the demand for new software. E.g., a cheap, good image editor would increase the demand for archiving and indexing software. The free software community in particular is most skilled at creating infrastructure and libraries that enable new applications. E.g., Linux + Apache + Perl + PostgresQL == the huge market for corporate web apps that did not exist 10 years ago.
2. If it was a zero-sum game, some people will be less able to adapt to the new market. Assuming you are clever and adaptable, free software would hurt your competitors more than it hurts you. Conversely, stupidity and inflexibility are not grounds for complaint.
Free software == not tying people's hands using copyright law.Free software != not needing any money.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
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
Donate the time to ask your company to buy a reiserfs service contract. (Lycos-Europe will tell you it is very happy it bought a service contract, and that our service is excellent.) Estimate 1% of the storage hardware cost that is used for reiserfs (you don't need to be more than roughly accurate, and only need to update the number once a year), and that will get you a priority service contract better than what you could get from a proprietary software vendor (with us the code authors are the ones who answer your emails.) You can use paypal at www.namesys.com/support.html, or send a check, or whatever your accounting department likes to do. Take the time to be as careful to buy service contracts on mission critical free software as you would to buy service contracts on proprietary products, and there will be lots more free software in this world.
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.
... just as long as you are saving as "MS-DOS" text and not some other kind of text...
This is totally right. With Open Source, you get tons of incompatible versons of basically the same thing. With one corperate souce for your software, you will NEVER have this problem.
Considering office suites, with Open Source, you have Star Office, Applixware, KOffice, and many more to chose from. It's so confusing! and most of these are compatible, but not always 100% compatible. With Microsoft you only have a single one: Office XP, nothing else, it's easy!
...Oh, wait, I forgot, you also have Office 2000 still around...
...Um, hold on a second, some people are still using Office 97 and 95...
...Ah, and I forgot about those people using the various service packs and each of them, not to mention that some of those versions are "professional" editions and some are "home office" and "small buisness"...
And maybe some losers are still back in the stone ages with Windows 3.11, did that even HAVE office back then? But, BUT all of these office suites from Microsoft are 100% compatible. 100%! (in "save as text" mode)
... er
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
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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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Adobe still needs to be punished for instigating the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov. He's now free, but Adobe never paid his legal costs and still supports the vile DMCA. Is there any way to support Gimp development financially? Are there other free software applications looking for financial support that offer viable alternatives to Adobe's core revenue-generating applications?
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