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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."
n/t
Yet another instance where going with Microsoft makes things easier!
Me.
I'll make that complicated decision for you...honest!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
and give them some of your time and effort by reporting bugs, making some code (if you can), helping with documentation, helping newbies on their support lists, etc.
sometimes our time is as good as some cash.
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
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.
OK, since I'm one of the founders, I'm biased. But free and open source software needs free and open standards and the Digital Standards Organization is the only international network set-up specifically to defend and promote free and open digital standards.
Coincidentally, on the day we signed the Hague Declaration, Microsoft announced they would support ODF in Office.
Luckily, Digistan does not want your money, just your support. Sign the Hague Declaration online, and help us by getting involved.
My blog
Perl6 (Rakudo && Parrot) is making big steps forward in the last months. The Perl Foundation is using the money to support some of the developers which are working part-time on the projects.
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.
...since everyone will cheer for their pet project. Personally I'm inclined to go with KDE - they and QT are working to create a real development platform (phonon, solid, all the non-UI classes already in QT etc.) on Linux, not just a UI toolkit. Yes, I know GTK+ and family also have various non-UI things but none as polished that I've seen.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I would personally probably donate to the most relevant project, which since DesktopBSD is more or less a FreeBSD distro, and since KDE gets help from SuSE/Novell, the KUbuntu people, etc. it would end up being FreeBSD
Rather than donating to a project with corporate backing, why not split your donation up and give it to a few smaller projects instead? You're more likely to make a difference there. Even the tiniest donation could give a lone developer the extra enthusiasm needed to fix that one last bug before calling it a night.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Just pick one at random, if you can't make up your mind. Or split your money to a few of the projects you find most useful, valuable, or which you like best. Next time you get the urge, donate to someone else. Don't worry so much about it, things will even out in the long run.
In Murphy We Turst
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.
Software you are talking about is business, or should be business. Donate money to the poor instead.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
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
I had considered that too. But there will always be disasters in the world. Maybe this guy already donates to such projects. I would think that's quite likely if he's even considering donating to software projects (something I've never really considered before). Anyway, this guy is asking about donating to software projects, so less patronising suggestions please!
which is totally what she said
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
GNU
donate (time || money || expertise) here:
http://www.gnu.org/help/help.html
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
Read and Comment at my BLOG
!!!
How about your local Internet cyberfreedom group? That means EFF (US), Open Rights Group (UK), European Digital Rights Initiative, Digital Rights Ireland, Free Software Foundation or other civil liberties/human rights groups. Just an idea.
I'd say give out lots of small donations. One group worth targeting in your donation are college students - often they are short on cash, and if they are trying to make the decision about whether to spend an hour hunting a bug in some open source code or get a crappy McJob flipping hamburgers, your donation may flip the balance for them. Having good experiences contributing to the free software world in one's formative years may also help a person avoid the temptation of crappy development jobs in the future.
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
In this day and age, there are still software developers who - through no fault of their own - do not own a 50 inch Pioneer plasma.
I happen to be one of those unfortunate souls.
Please, give generously.
Meep.
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.
Like it or not, your security depends on it, and it's chronically underfunded last I checked.
It's the backbone of the Free Software.
There are clearly a multitude of metrics by which you can assess the answer to your question.
Humanitarian: language translation / disability assistance software / tor.
Wanting to overthrow the evil empire: wine, firefox.
Wanting better hardware support: kernel developers.
Wanting to thank people: any projects you use/couldn't do without.
Really, it works best to just donate according to your own special favoritism. This way the projects get money in proportion to how much people/need want them. If you just wanted to pick the one project that will contribute the most to humanity, well, I can tell you already it's going to involve feeding hungry children and not improving your boot time.
If you like, you can imagine you are purchasing the software, and donate whatever is the highest price you would have been willing to pay for it (or at least use that to figure out the proportions in which you should divide your money).
20$ I say split it 10 FreeBSD and 10 KDE. If more then you can add evenly to each project and then start deferring to each project that you find useful. I would recommend nothing under 5$ to keep things simpler.
;)
That just my $0.05, consider it a donation
We need some sort of model that would allow us to remunerate programmers. I will attempt a VERY ROUGH sketch for it. Try to get the basic idea and I would love responses. It's based on ParEcon which I believe shoots for the best values an economic system can produce: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parecon The ideal would be to remunerate according to "effort & sacrifice". Trouble is how can we figure out who is expending the most effort and doing the hardest work? We've got to turn to evaluation of coworkers or project collaborators to find out. Letting aside corporate backed or other projects which income other than "donations" for the sake of argument, we could then try to balance remuneration across different FOSS projects. If one project is more tedious, difficult and unrewarding they should be better remunerated for their sacrifice. Projects that are empowering, rewarding in of themselves will have lesser priority. To organize the whole thing, we would also need to find out which projects are actually useful. Since users can't really see beyond GUI's, asking users won't be ideal. We could base it on an objective statistic of how many users use which products, let's say Ubuntu phones home to report the stats (if the user wishes to participate in this and privacy stuff is figured out etc.). The whole thing of course must come together in an organization of FOSS programmers to manage the information about who's doing how much of the most useful work. Funds from donations could be pooled and distributed accordingly instead of direct patronage. Perhaps SourceForge can be a starting point. What do you think?
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
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.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
The work of their various Councils and Societies encompasses a large number of projects, to include Open Source projects.
Bark less. Wag more.
wow... need c[_]... I read that as "Monty Python and PHP"
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
But it is offtopic. "Should I name my baby Ken or Ralph?" "You should adopt. There are so many orphans out there."
Put identity in the browser.
I don't know what this is up to, but ...
> print hello+comma+space+world
This is performance killer. You should instead write:
print "%s%s%s%s" % (hello, comma, space, world)
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
I too am one of those unfortunates.
I sit and watch my 42" LCD with a tear in my left eye. With a 50" plasma, both my eyes would be on fire!
Donate much and regularly. Please.
On a serious note: In ten years of OSS programming I've only once received a user donation. It was $25 deposited into my paypal account and it meant a lot to me. Unsolicited donations are a pick-me-up that lasts for days.
I typically support the software titles I use regularly. OpenOffice, FireFTP, TrueCrypt...several others. Google and Canonical don't really need the charity but I'd support both organizations in my consulting business...if either of them would return a phone call.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
this may come as a suprise ... but sometimes other people besides the questioner read the answers.
Shocking I know.
And he _did_ say "donate" and not "donate money".
or maybe they have no sense of humour whatsoever.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
That would make programs more enjoyable to read. If I knew PHP, I'd whip something up about Lumberjacks.....
Layne
XBMC for Linux is where I think money ought to go - that or the EFF to whom I donate to every DEFCON. Many of us have used XBMC on the old XBOX but it's now been ported to Linux using SDL so in addition it is also being ported to OSX and even Windows. The code can now handle HD video and while still "Alpha" I find that it works well enough that I'm using it on my main HTPC to watch movies often. EFF needs no introduction.
http://xbmc.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=52 for more information on Linux XBMC or check out the Wiki -> http://www.xboxmediacenter.net/wiki/?title=HOW-TO_compile_XBMC_for_Linux_from_source_code
P.S. ffmpeg is a project that MANY others benefit from including XBMC, if they need money they are also a worthy cause.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
- When I merged two pieces of source code using Meld, I donated $10
- Upon finding out I could resize windows in Vim in an xterm, I donated $10, and another $5 when I found out how nicely it works together with X11 clipboards
- When my business started earning money, I donated to CentOS because that's what's installed on my servers
- When the Dag Wieers RPM repository had packaged a piece of software for me, he saved me an hour of work -- so I donated $10
And lots more. Outside of that, I donated to OpenSSH by buying a T-shirt for a colleague his birthday.8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Also the lesson that "xv" should have taught us more than fifteen years ago is that you can have a program that everyone uses in the unix environment and hardly anybody is ever going to pay for it.
Actually, no. I've just did two benchmarks:
for x in range(10000):
a = "hello"
b = ","
c = " "
d = "world"
The line they differed in was:
print "%s%s%s%s" %(a,b,c,d)
print a+b+c+d
and timed execution of both. The one with %s's took "real 0m0.347s", the one with +'s took mere "real 0m0.276s.
I don't understand it either.
My web domain.
Are you interested in open source hardware? Bothered by having trouble making PC hardware work with your OS? How about donating to the OGP?
www.opengraphics.org
www.openhardwarefoundation.org
Step 1: Make a list of specific things you use regularly.
Step 2: Divide the cash among those products.
Step 3: Profit for them!
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
It's a great project, is the base for your OS of choice, and benefits a *ton* of other projects. OpenSSH is written by the folks over at OpenBSD, so if you want to donate money to OpenSSH, donate to the OpenBSD folks.
...and donate to the Human Fund.
I'm not so sure. Consensus around here seems to be that Vista is a disaster, after all.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
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
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.
-a+b+c+d:
1.copy a,b,c,d to a new string
2.print copies everything to buffer while looking for "%".
-%s%s%s%s:
1.copy a,b,c,d to a new list (same as previous 1)
2.interpret %s%s%s%s - found "%", followed by "s"
3.copy element from list to buffer
4.continue with 2 until string is complete
now, memory allocation is not an issue, because these are all the variables you use. But the print parsing a+b+c+d is faster compared to "%s%s%s%s", because when "%" is found, more checks are done (i.e. initialize all possible parameters because you still don't know if it's a string, number, pointer address, etc., either of which could be limited). So even if "%s%s%s%s" is only 9 characters (including \0), it can be costlier than a+b+c+d, which is 13 characters. Remember that the "printf"-type functions are very general.
I spent some time thinking about what tools I use most, checked out some web sites to see how badly different project need money and ended up donating to OpenSSH. ( http://paul.totterman.name/blog/supporting-free-software.html )
touch donate.txt
for ((n=0; n<17280; n++));
do
ps x -o pcpu= -o comm= | sort -k 2 | uniq -s 5 > ps.out
cat ps.out | while read cpu app; do
cpu_accum=`cat donate.txt | grep -e "$app\$" | cut -f 1 -d " "`;
if [ "x$cpu_accum" = "x" ]; then
echo $cpu $app;
fi;
done > ps.new
cat ps.out | while read cpu app; do
cpu_accum=`cat donate.txt | grep -e "$app\$" | cut -f 1 -d " "`;
if [ "x$cpu_accum" != "x" ]; then
new_cpu=`echo $cpu_accum + $cpu | bc -l`
echo $new_cpu $app;
fi;
done > ps.accum
cat donate.txt | while read cpu app; do
line=`cat ps.out | grep -e "$app\$"`;
if [ "x$line" = "x" ]; then
echo $cpu $app;
fi;
done > ps.old
mv donate.txt donate.txt.old
cat ps.accum ps.old ps.new > donate.txt
rm ps.accum ps.old ps.new ps.out
sleep 5
done
I hear SCO have fallen on hard times, you could always donate to them. YCSTB.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Check out my URL--it has links to projects I've donated to over the past couple of years & links to others I plan to donate to. Donation doesn't have to be a one time thing and you can eventually donate to many important projects. Just think of how much you're saving on proprietary software & divide it across dozens of projects.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_in_the_Public_Interest
Isn't it kind of odd that the desktop version of a distro that prides itself on its liberal license and use of C ends up with the C++-based desktop under the GPL, instead of the C-based desktop under the LGPL?
Donate to all of them. Every month or two I donate to Mozilla, Firefox/Tbird extension developers, KDE, wine, and some other projects. Don't make one big donation to one place, make lots of small donations to lots of places. Do it regularly. And like a previous poster said, take a day and triage some bugs. You can do 20 bugs in a good day.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Better to just choose and donate. Perhaps not equitable, but trying to rank and choose based on some criterion of 'merit' seems bound to fail.
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
# greeter.py - © Anonymous Coward™ 2008, All Rights Reserved
#
#
##GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
##
##Version 3, 29 June 2007
##
##Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. <http://fsf.org/>
##
##Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
##Preamble
##
##The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works.
##
##The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its users. We, the Free Software Foundation, use the GNU General Public License for most of our software; it applies also to any other work released this way by its authors. You can apply it to your programs, too.
##
##When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things.
##
##To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others.
##
##For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.
##
##Developers that use the GNU GPL protect your rights with two steps: (1) assert copyright on the software, and (2) offer you this License giving you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify it.
##
##For the developers' and authors' protection, the GPL clearly explains that there is no warranty for this free software. For both users' and authors' sake, the GPL requires that modified versions be marked as changed, so that their problems will not be attributed erroneously to authors of previous versions.
##
##Some devices are designed to deny users access to install or run modified versions of the software inside them, although the manufacturer can do so. This is fundamentally incompatible with the aim of protecting users' freedom to change the software. The systematic pattern of such abuse occurs in the area of products for individuals to use, which is precisely where it is most unacceptable. Therefore, we have designed this version of the GPL to prohibit the practice for those products. If such problems arise substantially in other domains, we stand ready to extend this provision to those domains in future versions of the GPL, as needed to protect the freedom of users.
##
##Finally, every program is threatened constantly by software patents. States should not allow patents to restrict development and use of software on general-purpose computers, but in those that do, we wish to avoid the special danger that patents applied to a free program could make it effectively proprietary. To prevent this, the GPL assures that patents cannot be used to render the program non-free.
##
##The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and modification follow.
##TERMS AND CONDITIONS
##0. Definitions.
##
##â€oeThis License†refers to version 3 of the GNU General Public License.
##
##â€oeCopyright†also means copyright-like la
It sounds like a country that Dilbert and friends might found, as a rival to Elbonia.
Surprised no one said it until now, but how about you donate to the linux next month and donate to those much much less fortunate this month?
Donate to me, I'll gladly take it in the name of progressing OSS. Seriously though, I don't understand why people turn to masses to make up their minds for them. Is it because people want to do what everyone else is doing? Anyone you choose to donate to will be helpful, Ko-Hai.
How about PostgreSQL? http://www.postgresql.org/
http://www.x2ii.info/
How about the "help pay off Amon's student loans" fund? Or wait, How about the "help Amon get a copy of guitar hero" fund"?
I think my company can use it for recruiting! :-P
donate to the guy in need of donations.
:-)
Not going by the mention or HTML styling of the we *_need_* donations or "puhleeeeeeeeeeez donate" etc, but by looking at
1. the value of the code
2. the number of users it impacts (not the number of users counted publicly)
3. the financial background of the core team
4. the place they come from - _sometimes_ that has strong correlation, not causation, of financial position -
5. stated urgency of funds by the author(s) - you know english, you know the world, FLOSS programmers are not exactly crooks or mind gamers, for donations at least, (m$ will tell you otherwise...)
There are guys out there who slog ass for nothing inspite of financial problems without even uttering a complaint - yes, old-style character lives in this age, contrary to popular belief.
How do you find out the above facts plus more?
Visit Ohloh and Sourceforge
If you want a happy middle-ground, check out if the sf.net project's coder has himself listed as a support provider at any of the support exchanges - Redhat, sf.net, berlios, tigris, etc and use his paid services - you can get to know the person as well.
He likes it because he *earned* the money, you can donate more to the project by having your boss (read " *big* pockets " ) buy the coder's support services.
If boss likes it he recommends to others, gives a press release etc etc, you've done more than necessary to financially support the chap. He might even remember you as a friendly patron.
Why do I talk so much about this - Simple, been there, done that - both sides
(Now, now, please do not quote out of context...)
Hackers have long memories. It works both ways.
just a thought.
In general, the printf version should be faster. It should first parse the format string (very quick), scan the lengths of the arguments (not sure how strings are represented in your language, but if they're not just C strings then this is a constant-time operation). Then it allocates the buffer. This looks like a language without manual memory management, so this should be done in a generational GC which means it's a simple addition (one instruction - maybe three if it's a load / store architecture). Then it will do the copy, which is a O(n) operation.
With concatenation, you are implicitly creating three new string objects. First you are creating "hello,", then "hello, " then "hello, world", and each of these requires a copy of the left and right hand sides of the + operator.
The catch here is that you are performing the operation on constants. A good compiler will know that you are performing pure functional operations (i.e. no side-effects) on constant expressions. In both of these cases, the compiler can work out that the result will always be constant and should replace your line with 'print "hello, world"' in both cases. I would guess that no one has written an optimisation pass for the printf-like case. Looking through the LLVM source code, the SimplifyLibCalls pass, which I'd expect to do this, doesn't, and so it might be worth adding this. On the other hand, it's fairly uncommon for code containing I/O to be CPU-bound so it might not be worth bothering.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
And revolving at 900 miles an hour,
That's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars
It's 100,000 light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light years thick
But out by us its just 3,000 light years wide
We're 30,000 light years from galactic central point,
We go round every 200 million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding Universe.
The Universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know,
12 million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
Because there' bugger all down here on earth. So how about then, you gonna give us your money (and your liver)?
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
What if the operating system had functionality to somehow trace the usage of each of the various FOSS systems (via processor time or something), and then allowed you to automatically say "I want to donate $100 to the projects that I use, tell me where it should go." The OS could give you a report that shows you how much you actually use each of the various OSS subsystems on the platform, and perform an automatic percentage-wise allocation to the various organizations involved which take centralized donations? The user could overweight or underweight according to "fuzzy" factors ("I just love my torrent client so much"). It would of course require centralized repositories of where to send money for which project, but it seems like that could be reasonably tied to the package repositories themselves. Users could even set up automatic payments (if they are particularly charitable); register their credit card with the OS and say "divvy out $10 per month based on usage", thereby prompting far more sustainable and predictable donation streams for projects... This could theoretically lead to unreasonable overweighting of various things (the lower-level the component, the more higher level systems use them, the more processor time is allocated to code running in that layer, etc etc); the measurement method might get tricky, but seems like there must be some "good enough" method for determining usage.
I usually donate money when something occurs that brings into stark view the value of a piece of software.
So ask yourself what inspired you to donate. Maybe you installed this distro and were impressed with the job they've done in bundling all these packages together for you. Maybe your stuck behind an obnoxious firewall and an ssh socks proxy saved the day.
Donate to whatever project gave you the gumption to pull your wallet out whether it's some college kid or a large project.
Just make sure the page is protected by SSL.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
If you want to read something on this subject that will turn your head around and maybe tear it right off, check out Peter Singer's essay The Singer Solution to World Poverty and also the book by Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die referenced within.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Let's think a little more strategic for a few seconds :
... pick your favorite... honestly, my Killer thing is Wikipedia... whaetever). One of the biggest reason for people to stay on Windows is that they feel that they can't live without MS Office (whitch they more than often obtained illegally ;) ).
... hum, let's call this the dark side ! More people = more support (money, time, code, advices, feedback...).
The killer app is still Office (Or Isn't it the Web
Having a good replacement for Office could be a huge step into getting more people to, lets say, Ubuntu and other "Free made easy" ouvertures and thus getting more potential contributors. Oh wait there IS such a replacement !!!
I think that contribution to OpenOffice.org, right now, is a pretty strategic investment (yep, it's the right word) as it's devellopement would facilitate integration of many more people by diminishing one of the last "chains" they have to
Have fun and, whatever this discussion leads to... DO CONTRIBUTE !!!
FranÃois
Guys, sorry to be offtopic on this, but please mod me up.
If anyone have extra $ for donation at this time. It's definitely make MUCH more sense to donate to disaster-related humanitarian effort.
We have Myanmar's cyclone killing 50000+ and China's earthquake killing 50000+. Both countries need a lot of relief help.
http://ege-inc.org/ Of course, you'll have to help them finish http://giftfile.org/ first. ;-)
...you would have a better chance benefiting from throwing the money off a high building and hoping someone good will catch it.
More seriously, I think the best thing to help everybody would be either:
1. Electronic Frontier Foundation
They help protect and promote F/OSS in the community and in the courts. Helping EFF helps everybody fight THE MAN.
2. Mozilla Foundation
I would love to hear some arguments AGAINST, but in my observation they appear to be one of the biggest donors to F/OSS project, and likely do a lot of homework helping to answer the very question you are asking.
I am curious what others think of these observations, as I have been thinking a lot about this same question.
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
Turn in your geek card. You failed on a simple hello world program: Unused variable: exclamation_point.
Give time. Write documentation. Create artwork. Work on the website. Translate. Spread the word.
You don't have to know how to code to give back.
is THE anonymous Coward
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Software in the Public Interest Should be your first step.
(Supporting Debian indirectly supports your interests as many packages are sourced from there)
http://www.spi-inc.org/projects
Also see gnome friends and kde.
I also recommend supporting wine.
Donate to them and you get a tax write-off. :-)
Haven't heard that one before. "You can smell the bacon"? *shrug*
FOSS has done an amazing amount of good for the world, but I decided that my money can have a more significant impact on more urgent problems elsewhere. I've donated to Wikimedia, a nice blend between FOSS philosophy and usefulness Right Now for a very wide audience, but they're only useful for those of us with ready access to the 'net.
For advice on many of the major Good Causes, Charity Navigator appears very worthwhile. I've been using it for a few years, and find that while it misses a few, the information it provides is very interesting.
In case you care, my current top pick is Pathfinder International, although the Union of Concerned Scientists is always high up there. If you want more of an Amerigeek angle, there are always the EFF and the ACLU.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
Why not have the best of both worlds? Buy an XO laptop and sleep soundly at night knowing that your cash is being routed through a corrupt charity to pay for third-world kids to go through Microsoft Office indoctrination!
Or would you prefer to throw cash at Burma's military regime while the death toll rises? Whatever floats your boat I suppose.
Donate to anonymous and open source (unlikely to have back-doors) Internet communication systems like Freenet or Tor. These systems are often disparaged by people because they offer (theoretically) unfettered communication between peoples who have a desire and need to remain anonymous. These systems are important because they offer freedom from reprisal (economic, social, legal, physical, etc) for their THOUGHTS (expressed in text, pictures, videos, etc).
Many people disparage such anonymous communication methods because (in the West) they don't want "child pornography" to be distributed. This of course is FUD and an exaggeration (and a reality of course; so if you believe in repression based on your moral standards, then obviously you don't have any and should not donate). But if you believe that sharing thoughts or ideas (however they may be expressed) should not be a crime (a Thought Crime) then these mechanisms (Freenet and Tor, et al) should be the way to go. These projects lack in funding and support simply because of their 'controversial' nature.
If you believe in Freedom and Liberty, then support Tor and Freenet.
Ref:
http://www.torproject.org/
http://freenetproject.org/
Quote:
"I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?'"
--Mike Godwin, Electronic Frontier Foundation
You should donate to whichever group creates free software you truly enjoy and want to support.
Could be worse. The AC I responded to failed at printing a line.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Certainly not Microsoft. Perhaps the Regents of the University of California at Berkeely. When the DOD paid UCB to include TCP/IP in 4.2bsd Unix, that was probably the most important step towards making the Internet Protocols a standard. The fact the UCB worked for many years providing the Berkeley Unix extensions so that AT&T Unix could be more friendly speaks in their favor. If you liked SunOS 3.1 and you don't like Solaris, it's probably because you like the Berkeley enahancements and not System V. Also you could consider UUNET because they hosted the Berkeley sources for many years and for a long time, that is where many people get their first TCP/IP sources from.
"whom"???
Damn.
Resident Grammar Nazi
Max.
You should donate to me. You should donate precisely 120$ for that's what I need to buy . The HP Scanjet G2410 Flatbed Scannerhttp://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/in/en/ho/WF05a/1090037-1090177-1090485-1090485-80566297-80566298.html Why? This is only scanner and I wanna work with the developers to support it. I want to actively use the product so my life is made easier than before. No other flat-bed scanner in the Rs. 3-4k/- range which has SANE support at good or excellent levels :(
If I'm able to get this working, lot of people atleast in the Indian sub-continent would also have better days.
Shirish Agarwal Life is a dream Enjoy it!
I could give a logical argument, but that would be benign. Instead, save your money when FOSS is no longer a LOSS and invest in it. On the other hand, if you have money to throw around, most projects are funded by universities so look for obscure, yet promising endeavors and maybe you'll be lucky.