To Whom Should I Donate?

jasonmanley writes "I currently use DesktopBSD. The other day I gave some thought to donating money to the project, but then I got to thinking — to whom would I donate the money? DesktopBSD benefits from FreeBSD and KDE among other projects. What about software with a smaller focus, such as OpenSSH? In fact, there are heaps of other projects' software embedded in FOSS packages, and I would like to know who the community thinks should get the donations."

Comments

Re:Some options

[Anonymous Coward]

I donate regularly to vim and groklaw.

The short answer is, donate to whoever you like.

Re:I would donate to the Perl Foundation

[somersault]

How is that offtopic? It's a suggestion for a donation. "I would" is short for "If I were you, I would", which is a valid suggestion rather than just a piece of random information.

People saying "donate your time rather than your money" are very slightly offtopic, because the guy doesn't sound like he would rather support other projects financially than become a developer himself.

Donations - Not what you think!!!

[zukinux]

The common thinking would be, why should I donate to a big project, they must have been getting billions already
The truth is different guys, just from looking at the donations page at KDE.org I would have thought that that they get at-least 30K$ p/m, but the truth is different (300$, in a good month)
We, the USERS, should donate more

I would donate to...

[geekymachoman]

Debian. See: http://www.debian.org/social_contract And, if you'r interested after reading above, see: http://www.debian.org/donations Im not in anyway affiliated with Debian project, except I use it for every day work. You asked to whom you might donate, so this is my opinion.. they contributed "much" to the Open Source community. I know you'r not using Debian, but thats not the point. The point (imho) is in helping the Open Source and OS projects.

OpenSSL

[Anonymous Coward]

Like it or not, your security depends on it, and it's chronically underfunded last I checked.

Re:EFF? FSF? ORG?

[Anonymous Coward]

I second the idea of donating to the FSF or EFF, great organizations helping keep free software free.

Donate to FSFE - fighting swpat, DRM, etc.

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

Don't forget the organisations that defend your right to write software, like FSFE.

And you don't have to be European to like FSFE's work. As well as fighting against software patents at the European level, we have people working at the UN/WIPO/WSIS global level to prevent harm in future treaty (such as TRIPS, which was the basis for the EU proposal to allow software patents).

And we do licence enforcement, campaigning for open standards, campaigning against the criminalisation of the grey areas of copyright law, and we supported SAMBA in their push to make the documentation published by Microsoft usable by free software developers. And more, but if I stop to think, then this post won't appear high enough to be seen :-)

You can donate, or join the Fellowship.

Re:How many people benefit?

[Klaus_1250]

Agree with parent. You could also set aside the money for a few months and see which project actually has issues with funding. If I remember correctly from about 2 years ago, OpenBSD (and OpenSSH) had serious issues with funding at that time: http://bsd.slashdot.org/bsd/06/03/21/1555243.shtml .

Occasionally, a part-time dev may step forward and announce he/she is willing to work full time on the project for a period time, provided people are willing to financially support him/her. Those may be good times to sponsor as well.

Re:There Can Only Be One

[Anonymous Coward]

The BSD family he's using software from don't use much GNU software (other than GCC [which they're trying to move away from] and perhaps some small utilities).
You never hear RMS proclaming it should be called GNU/BSD.

Don't mix up GNU with GPL.

- Peder

Re:How many people benefit?

[Krunch]

> OpenSSH, you would actually be donating to OpenBSD who
> run the OpenSSH project, but whatever.

Actually, you can make a donation specifically to OpenSSH as said on the donation page.
http://openssh.org/donations.html

Of course most OpenSSH people are also OpenBSD people.

Qt

[Per Abrahamsen]

Qt is owned by Nokia, which I doubt really need donations.

I would instead take a look at Troll Techs various products, and keep them in mind if you ever need some of that.

Re:Relevancy ?

[bconway]

Doesn't look like it. Though I'm sure you weren't "recalling" anything, anyway.

Tax Deductible Gifts(USA)

[kilgortrout]

If you want to deduct your donation in the US, the organization must be certified by the IRS as a qualified nonprofit organization. This is commonly referred to as 501(c)(3) certification after the IRS regulation that deals with nonprofits. An organization known as Software in the Public Interest(SPI) is a certified 501(c)(3) orgnaiztion that was primarily set up to fund the Debian project but also gives to many oother free software projects:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_in_the_Public_Interest

Re:Making things complicated.

[the_B0fh]

RedHat is a commercial enterprise, much like Microsoft. You buy from RedHat because you want commercial support. There is no non-profit segment to RedHat. They contribute to opensource because their business model requires it. If they don't make money, they will go away. However, the opensource software will still be around.

For the OP, I would take a look at a couple of factors:
1) which piece affects you the most?
2) which project is the poorest?

Personally, I prefer to donate to OpenBSD because

1. they do not have much external resources
   
2. they stand by and for their principles which result in much freer opensource:
   
   • look at the release of SUNW documentation for the sparc cpus - it's mostly OpenBSD's work
     
   • look at the reverse engineering of the atheros firmware
     
   • look at all the other work with vendors to release information, sometimes browbeating the vendors to keep their promises
     
   • look at all the security work they've performed, including creating 4 APIs that is now used by all, that reduces buffer overflow issues
     
   • look at all the work done in simplifying various software that are important, such as openntpd, openbgpd
     
   
   

Mind you, I think donating to KDE is good too.