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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."
If you are dead set on donating to *one* of the projects, donate to the one who you consider most useful to you.
If you have some rad coding skillz and some time, i'm sure the projects would also love to see bug reports with patches.
Do you use any of the software to work/as part of your job? if so, the software that you use for that is a great candidate for a project to donate to.
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.
A question you should be thinking about is, "how many people will benefit from this donation?".
Let's have a look at the projects mentioned.
DesktopBSD, never heard of them, probably have quite a small user-base compared to FreeBSD.
FreeBSD, benefits more then just your personal desktop OS. Lots of people use it, code flows sideways to other BSD's.
KDE, benefits heaps of people, not just those using BSD based OSs, but also Linux based OSs.
OpenSSH, you would actually be donating to OpenBSD who run the OpenSSH project, but whatever. Again, code will flow sideways to other BSD's, and OpenSSH is used by sooo many people.
Next question, how popular is the project? How many donations do they get?
DesktopBSD, probably doesn't get too many donations, small user base and all that.
FreeBSD would get a bit, KDE would get a lot more (much larger userbase), and OpenBSD would get a bit as well.
So, my suggestion, don't donate to KDE if you only have minimal funds, they probably get lots of cash from other sources.
DesktopBSD might be worth chucking some money at if you like them.
But consider donating to FreeBSD or OpenBSD, even if you don't use them directly. Their code will help you (via DesktopBSD), and will also help other people. They also probably don't get so many donations because of the smaller userbase compared to KDE.
I wank in the shower.
here we are not talking about charity, we are talking about returning some value (that we are taking advantage from) to the people that make it possible, to continue having it. It is some kind of purchase but not in a regular way.
So don't be so demagogic
Its the guesture i think is important, not the money. The more people that see that someone thinks their work is worthwhile the better. As for what projects to donate to i cant say anything, follow your heart but dont forget those that you never think about but greatly benefits you. Im thinking of those that always just works and so good that you very rarely touch them or see them.
HTTP/1.1 400
I'm sure a lot of open source developers are poor. And as I pointed out in other places, how do you even know that this guy doesn't donate to the poor or other causes? If he's at the level of thinking about donating to software projects, he probably already donates to other more 'worthy' causes as well?
which is totally what she said
GNU
donate (time || money || expertise) here:
http://www.gnu.org/help/help.html
sometimes our time is as good as some cash. And sometimes cash is better than time, so now we're back at square one having wasted 20 seconds. What was the point of that? If the guy had asked how should I donate then yes, your comment would be applicable but clearly the guy has some money to spend and is asking where to put it. Maybe he doesn't have free time, maybe he just doesn't want to spend it on open source. Even if by some freak occurrence all links in the BSD chain find themselves fully funded there's always more that money can do. Money can buy other people's time if that's really the only thing needed. In any case, I don't see how suggesting that this guy's offered money is less valuable than his time is really useful to anyone. I'm sure there are plenty of cash-starved projects that would much prefer the money to help allow the core developers to focus on the project than have one extra guy adding a line of code here or there.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Back when I was maintaining a somewhat popular free software project, I occasionally (very occasionally, twice over 10 years) got offers of donations. Both time I thanked for the thought, and suggested a donation to the FSF instead. Really, I did it as a hobby, and didn't want the moral obligations coming from accepting money.
Send a "thank you" letter to those who do not solicit donations, and tell them why their software is useful to you. It means surprisingly much