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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
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