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."

Cowboyneal

n/t

Making things complicated.

Yet another instance where going with Microsoft makes things easier!

Re:Making things complicated.

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.

Microsoft did.

Easy answer!

Me.

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

Re:Easy answer!

Me.

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

just choose your favorite project

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

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

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.

To the Digital Standards Organization

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 [digistan.org] is the only international network set-up specifically to defend and promote free and open digital standards [digistan.org].

Coincidentally, on the day we signed the Hague Declaration [digistan.org], 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.

Only to projects that already accept donations

Money can be a strong incentive, but it can also cause trouble in open source project, as Debians "Dunc Tank" [dunc-tank.org] 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.

Agreed

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 [fsf.org] 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

Let the flamewars begin...

...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 ?

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

The little guys

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

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

Re:The little guys

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

How many people benefit?

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?

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 [slashdot.org] .

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.

to all the people talking about other causes

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

Me.

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.

OpenSSL

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

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:A bit of perspective

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

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.