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

Cowboyneal

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

Making things complicated.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another instance where going with Microsoft makes things easier!

Re:Making things complicated.

[davester666]

Actually, giving the money to Microsoft would almost be like a lottery.

There is a 1 in 20 jillion chance of them making significant improvements to their operating system, software, and business practices resulting in a decent, problem free [or much reduced] computing system.

The odds of this happening are excruciatingly small, just like a lottery. The different thing about it is, if you 'hit', it greatly improves the computing experience of most of the computing world [so it's like everyone wins].

This post can be modded: flamebait, insightful, dopey, idiotic, and/or funny. Any other modding is expressly forbidden.

Re:Making things complicated.

[dvice_null]

Microsoft did.

Re:Making things complicated.

[erikina]

You have a point. With traditional services/product - if you want to support someone, you simply use them. Want to support Honda? Buy one.

However, when everything is free - this really doesn't work in the same sense. So I guess the option is donating or buying products from an open source company (like red hat). Another option would be instead of just donating - pay someone (possibly through a bounty system) to fix a bug or add a feature to some program.

Then again, there are some pretty cool projects that deserve a straight donation.

Re:Making things complicated.

[PopeRatzo]

Microsoft - Because choices are confusing

Yes, I prefer the panoply of choices that Apple gives me.

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.

Easy answer!

[rts008]

Me.

I'll make that complicated decision for you...honest!

Re:Easy answer!

[mrbluze]

Me.

That's what Bill Gates was thinking when he came out with Windows Me.

Re:Easy answer!

[Hal_Porter]

Windows Me? 'Windows' is now a verb?

Re:Easy answer!

[mrbluze]

Windows Me? 'Windows' is now a verb?

Actually... yeah.

• "I think my computer is Windowsed."
• "That is sooooo Windowsed!"
• "Go and get W*ndowsed!"

Yep. Works for me.

Re:Easy answer!

[R.D.Olivaw]

Verb "I".

I've been Iing hybrid cars for a while now. I think I might buy one.

Re:Easy answer!

[lilomar]

What, do you get in and encourage the car to develop a personality? That's pretty odd. That's awesome. Don't listen to this naysayer. Let me know how that goes.

just choose your favorite project

[crazybit]

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.

Re:just choose your favorite project

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

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. 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.

Some options

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Some options

[Anonymous Coward]

I donate regularly to vim and groklaw.

The short answer is, donate to whoever you like.

Re:Some options

[shird]

Taking this approach, you would almost always donate to a GUI based project. The 'most useful' is going to be something you interact with, and not something behind the scenes like the kernel - regardless of how much extra effort may be required for one over the other.

Re:Some options

[Corporate Troll]

Well, that depends on your own vision of things. One of the most useful software packages I found in the last 8 years (is it really already that long) was OpenBSD. At first I bought their CDs and T-Shirts occasionally. Then I started buying their CD on the 6 month release shedule and I just rounded it up to the next 100€ (back then CDs were 30€ or so) donating the difference. Now I even stopped doing that: I just have a monthly standing order to their account. I still buy the CDs occasionally, but it's not the rule anymore.

Why OpenBSD? Because I like the system (not on the desktop, but as a server it's nice). They created OpenSSH which benefits pretty much every Unix out there. Their security fixes propagate to other platforms and software.

So, no, "useful" is what you define it to be. I find OpenBSD useful because it's there, in the background, routing my packets, protecting my computers. I find that insanely more useful and important that anything else. (Note, that this has never stopped me from donating to other projects, including OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, OpenWebmail, and many others...)

To the Digital Standards Organization

[pieterh]

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.

I would donate to the Perl Foundation

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Only to projects that already accept donations

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Let the flamewars begin...

[Kjella]

...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.

Relevancy ?

[BrainInAJar]

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

Re:Relevancy ?

[bconway]

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

Re:Relevancy ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Donating to your favorite project should be like paying extra principal on your mortgage: It doesn't have to be a big, one-time donation. Lots of little ones are good too, maybe even better. And the payoff going forward is better because it lets the project look at steady funding, not some transient never-to-be-repeated windfall.

Now my plug: I've been doing modest tax time donations to the FreeBSD Foundation and the Postgresql project for a couple years now. Because they're modest I can make them a permanent part of our family's contributions. And I'm not even your typical nerdy Slashdotter; just a home user who's impressed by what he's done with both those products. And it makes me feel good.

The little guys

[Bogtha]

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.

Re:The little guys

[wfWebber]

Yeah. Nothing sets the spirits like receiving $0.05 from an enthousiastic user.

Re:The little guys

[Skal Tura]

Spot on!
That's so damn right!

While my project wasn't FOSS, it was a browser strat game, keeping it running beyond personal interest for over a year longer was made to happen by the community support, we even almost finished up the next generation version of it (everything polished and updated, lots and lots of new content)

In the end in my case "life came", and i just didn't have the time nor motivation to keep maintaining it. But it did give the community almost a year more time to enjoy the game :)

As for donation suggestions, my 2cents:
  something which increases productivity: User friendly application, something you use constantly and it saves you time.

  Personally i'd look into putting cash on some of the "life saving" tools: Backup, Data Forensics/Recovery, Security apps, or maybe something which increases server performance or reliability

Re:The little guys

[nfk]

Even better would be just $0.02, accompanied by a big rant about future direction of the project.

Re:The little guys

[value_added]

Yeah. Nothing sets the spirits like receiving $0.05 from an enthousiastic user.

You could always extend that to a more personal approach.

I'm a regular at a local Mexican restaurant. Instead of dropping my loose change anonymously in the tip jar, I show up with a few sixpacks of beer for the staff, and maybe some cut flowers for the hostess. I don't do this on a regular basis, but frequently enough to give everyone a good laugh. Now, my food orders are on the grill as soon as they see me pulling into the parking lot, and I walk out knowing the burritos I ordered were bigger than everyone else's, or my order included things that everyone waiting in line would pay extra for.

Substitute beer with hookers and blackjack (be sure the hookers aren't crossing state lines), airline tickets, gift certificates or whatever else you think may be appropriate, and you might discover those few cents can add up and have a greater effect than you'd think.

Which ever

[heikkile]

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.

How many people benefit?

[apathy maybe]

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.

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: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.

A bit of perspective

[mapkinase]

Software you are talking about is business, or should be business. Donate money to the poor instead.

Re:A bit of perspective

[somersault]

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?

Re:A bit of perspective

[slim]

Software you are talking about is business, or should be business. I fundamentally disagree with this statement. Business is part of the software ecosystem. But software, including operating systems, can and should be written, distributed and used outside of a business context.

Re:A bit of perspective

[somersault]

Yeah I'm making assumptions which may not be valid, but in the end it's up to this guy how he wants to spend his own money anyway.

I think the world could do with quite a bit of wealth redistribution, but I usually think of it as a rather fruitless exercise when any money that goes into certain countries just gets frittered away by a corrupt government rather than actually helping the people in poor conditions. I give 10% of my money to the church because I know that they will spread it amongst many different good causes, though I'm thinking about stopping that and maybe just giving directly to some charities. Donating to FOSS OSes doesn't seem like that bad an idea, because then any country that is on the proper path to education and such will have good free software to work with, and not have to pay the Microsoft tax. Is that not worth $10 out of every million?

I feel like a dick when I consider that I don't want to put more money towards a country controlled by a corrupt government, when if I was one of the inhabitants of that country I'd probably appreciate any aid provided by outsiders, but really it just seems that it's not going to do any good in the long run. I would have much rather seen GWB invade Uganda rather than Iraq for example, though I'm not convinced invasion is the best way to sort out a government either (not that I know any better ways myself, but I am not an economist or very well versed on international politics as you can maybe tell).

to all the people talking about other causes

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Spread the money out.

[miffo.swe]

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.

There Can Only Be One

[bball99]

GNU

donate (time || money || expertise) here:

http://www.gnu.org/help/help.html

Re:There Can Only Be One

[xaxa]

I don't really follow what GNU do with donations, but I donate to the FSF Europe -- and they're campaigning against DRM, standing up against Microsoft in court etc.

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

Re:Donations - Not what you think!!!

[sproot]

The rest of their donations seem to be listed here.
Mostly Hosting / hardware and employing devs, some cash though.

Re:Donations - Not what you think!!!

[darthflo]

I'm not advocating to donate less to KDE, but apart from the page you mentioned, KDE gets corporate support (as already mentioned) and has several patrons.
Also, IIRC, KDE is very closely related to SuSE which then again belongs to Novell now. With that kind of background support, they don't seem to be struggling to pay their bandwidth bills, so I tend to stick to smaller projects without corporate backing. I find my money to make more of a difference than it'd make to KDE, Gnome, OpenSuSE or Fedora (and so on).

EFF? FSF? ORG?

[bbtom]

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.

Re:EFF? FSF? ORG?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Me.

[Zoolander]

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.

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.

It won't work if we tell you

[explodingspleen]

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).

Re:Me!

[Nullav]

def hello():
    hello="Hello"
    comma=","
    space=" "
    world="world"
    exclamation_point="!"
    print hello+comma+space+world
def y_halo_thar():
    hello()
y_halo_thar()

The beauty of Open Source!

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:Take a Look Around

[Daengbo]

But it is offtopic. "Should I name my baby Ken or Ralph?" "You should adopt. There are so many orphans out there."

Re:Me!

[gzipped_tar]

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)

Me Too!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

this may come as a suprise ...

[pbhj]

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".

XBMC - it's being ported to Linux!

[BLKMGK]

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.

Donate when you solve a problem

[cerberusss]

I always donate when I just solved a problem with some piece of software, or found a particular functionality I appreciate:

• 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.

The Open Graphics Project

[Theovon]

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

Re:Take a Look Around

[ciaohound]

I promise, Microsoft won't get any of it.

I'm not so sure. Consensus around here seems to be that Vista is a disaster, after all.

Agreed

[Per Abrahamsen]

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

[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.

What tools do you use most?

[halfnerd]

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 )

I hear SCO have fallen on hard times

[Bastard of Subhumani]

I hear SCO have fallen on hard times, you could always donate to them. YCSTB.

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