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."

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.

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" [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.

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.

A bit of perspective

[mapkinase]

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

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.

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: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.

There Can Only Be One

[bball99]

GNU

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

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

EFF? FSF? ORG?

[bbtom]

How about your local Internet cyberfreedom group? That means EFF [eff.org] (US), Open Rights Group [openrightsgroup.org] (UK), European Digital Rights Initiative [edri.org], Digital Rights Ireland [digitalrights.ie], Free Software Foundation [fsf.org] 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: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.

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!

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".

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 [sourceforge.net], I donated $10
• Upon finding out I could resize windows in Vim [vim.org] 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 [centos.org] because that's what's installed on my servers
• When the Dag Wieers RPM repository [wieers.com] 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.

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 [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

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 [totterman.name] )

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.

Re:Making things complicated.

[PopeRatzo]

Microsoft - Because choices are confusing

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