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GNU is Not Unix

How Can I Donate Old Hardware to Developers? 76

Posted by Cliff from the forlorn-hardware-seeks-good-home dept.
olddoc asks: "I have a computer I'd like to get rid of. It is still pretty useful for a developer, being a fairly powerful dual Athlon MP box, but there is no Microsoft OS on it so most charities in the area don't want it. I live in Eastern Pennsylvania, USA and I'm sure there are dozens of people who are developing GPL or BSD licensed software, who would be happy to get their hands on it. If my old computer is used to help develop free software, I'll get all warm and fuzzy inside. If I get a tax deduction for it so much the better. Does anyone know how to give a worthy project a hardware gift?"
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How Can I Donate Old Hardware to Developers? More

How Can I Donate Old Hardware to Developers?

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  • Contact + Pickup (Score:3, Informative)

    by comwiz56 ( 447651 ) <<comwiz> <at> <gmail.com>> on Thursday July 21, 2005 @06:32PM (#13130005) Homepage
    Conctact some projects you deem worthy of recieving the box. Since shipping is impractical unless they feel like dropping the money, you should try to find someone in a reasonably close area (you mentioned Peensylvania, shoudn't be a big prob) that would be willing to pick it up. I know I wouldn't mind a few hours of drive time for a box, especially something like yours that isnt a piece of junk.
    • I'm a Computer Engineering student, and I'd be interested in this box you want to donate. I'll pay shipping (I live in Southern California). Shoot me an email.
      • Somehow I knew that this was going to turn into an "I want it!" free for all...

        I have to admit, the box is bigger than anything I currently have, but then again, I'm willing to put up with more than most people. On the other side of things, my wife won't let me get another box until atleast 1 is gone (5 computers and growing).

        What she doens't know is that all the small boxes being shipped to me from the states to "upgrade" my main box are the workings to secretly make a newer, faster, better computer... M
        • Geeks tend to be pack rat for electronic items, and that usually cause relationship problem with their moms, girlfriend, or wife.
          I keep old stuff, but my brother went a step further to disect adapters for electronic components and wirings.

  • LUG's (Score:4, Interesting)

    by runswithd6s ( 65165 ) on Thursday July 21, 2005 @06:33PM (#13130026) Homepage
    Find the email address to a local LUG listserv and let them know the stats of the machine and that it's free!
  • How about posting on a bulletin board at a local college or university?
  • Just don't forget to uuencode it.

  • me me me (Score:3)

    by nocomment ( 239368 ) on Thursday July 21, 2005 @06:45PM (#13130117) Homepage Journal
    You can jsut send it to me.
  • Or is it only an Oregon Phenomenon? http://www.freegeek.org/ [freegeek.org], for anybody in the Portland Metro

  • or craigslist (Score:3, Informative)

    by m4c north ( 816240 ) on Thursday July 21, 2005 @06:52PM (#13130173)
    there's one for Philly [craigslist.org].

  • Or Freecycle it... (Score:3, Informative)

    by madaxe42 ( 690151 ) on Thursday July 21, 2005 @06:53PM (#13130177) Homepage
    Freecycle.org, i think.

  • OSS projects often need hardware (Score:4, Informative)

    by Neil Blender ( 555885 ) <neilblender@gmail.com> on Thursday July 21, 2005 @06:56PM (#13130200)
    And they accept donated hardware. FreeBSD is one:

    http://www.freebsd.org/donations/ [freebsd.org]

    You can get a tax deductionn too.
    • It's such a good idea I tried just that three years ago or so. Had some $4-20K SGI boxes to get rid of. I figured the BSD guys could use it and the owner was agreeable and only wanted a tax letter for it.

      After repeated queries I couldn't get anybody to respond from the appropriate e-mail addresses. There were guys on the list who wanted the gear, but unfortunately they went to a reseller instead because the letter couldn't be done.
    • You can get a tax deductionn too And if it's donated to FreeBSD there might be a tux deduction as well
  • I'm currently working on a few projects that will be released as OSS once done. I could use the machine as a development box or as a server to host the project once everything is ready, it could also help in terms of running virtual machines so I can test the software on different operating systems without having to reformat/switch machines. If you are interested, I can pay the shipping. Just reply to this message or email me: pursini {@} gmail.com

  • KDE (Score:3, Informative)

    by Punboy ( 737239 ) on Thursday July 21, 2005 @07:02PM (#13130250) Homepage
    Go to KDE-Artists and see if there is anyone there that might need it.

  • Send it to me. (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Photar ( 5491 )
    photar at gmail DOT com

  • the hardest part (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Eil ( 82413 ) on Thursday July 21, 2005 @07:22PM (#13130401) Homepage Journal

    The hardest part won't be giving it away. The hardest part will be finding someone that will actually put it to good use. I mean, if you just take every request at face value, a lot of them are probably just nobodies who want a free SMP system. (I know this, because I pondered the same thing for a nanosecond or two.)

    What you ought to do is find an active open source project where developer access to an SMP system would be useful. Good candidates are the Linux kernel and the BSD's, as well as number-crunching, desktop environments, and multimedia applications. Perferably it should be a project who's work you admire or use on a daily basis. Join their mailing list, lurk for awhile, and try to figure out who's who. Then post your offer to one of their mailing lists. Then and only then, offer your system to someone who you know to be a proven member of the community that has contributed a significant amount of code in the past and will likely continue to do so in the future.

    This is probably the best way to ensure that your gift ends up in the right hands.

    • Re:the hardest part (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Good candidates are the Linux kernel and the BSD's, as well as number-crunching, desktop environments, and multimedia applications.

      Don't donate to desktop environments, we want the KDE and GNOME developers to have old, slow hardware so they don't get too bloated!

      • The desktop environments are already bloated, they need powerful hardware just to compile the libraries and software to test their changes, otherwise it could take 4 weeks every full compile..

    • The hardest part won't be giving it away. [...] This is probably the best way to ensure that your gift ends up in the right hands.

      This guy is more noble than me... I just want the shit I've got out of my house. If you want a dual P3 700 or a 400mhz Sparc64 or some cat5 patch cables, please, dear god, come and get them out of my basement. They're not of sufficient value for the troubles of eBay, and I'm far to lazy to drive or ship them anywhere... If you're going to use them to develop free software, or u
  • ... to the Mepis guys in Morgantown, WV. Goto www.mepis.org and see if they are asking for donations. If they are (and it doesn't cost an arm and a leg to ship or live relatively close to the PA-WV state line) then go for it. Ruling them out, I'm sure there is a LUG or many a user group in your area that could put it to good use. As far as a tax break goes, I still think Mepis may be a good bet.

  • Ask Slashdot Article (Score:4, Funny)

    by swimin ( 828756 ) on Thursday July 21, 2005 @08:54PM (#13130969)
    Id try posting an article on Ask Slashdot, and announce which city I live in, and then read the comments for people who would pick it up.
  • I can't say that I'm going to be doing a whole lot of developing, but I run a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and I can use anything I can get my hands on. I have an intranet and portal to set up and several small database apps to write.

    Even though they make things fairly reasonable price-wise, there will be no Microsoft software in our organization. Everything is GPL F/OSS.

    We rehabilitate raptors (birds of prey, not dinosaurs) and do conservation education outreach.

    I can give you a nice, muchly grat
  • I'm in the process of building an open source desk and I need one more computer to complete my setup. Anyone who sits in the chair will be free to use it, and by sitting in the desk, this applies to your computer as well. Think about it - by donating the computer to me, you could potentially be helping out tens of people. And, technically, seeing as how I'm ordained in the Unitarian Church, it could be seen as tax deductable.

  • Ebay (Score:2, Interesting)

    by lathama ( 639499 )
    Ebay it cheap and donate the Proceeds...

  • How about giving it to these guys.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by rsax ( 603351 ) on Thursday July 21, 2005 @10:49PM (#13131621)
    They write some pretty decent software: OpenBSD, [openbsd.org] OpenSSH [openssh.com], OpenBGPD [openbgpd.org], OpenNTPD [openntpd.org], OpenCVS [opencvs.org]. And they need your hardware [openbsd.org] as well: "AMD64 and i386 hardware, especially with multiple processors"

    If I were you then I would contact Theo [mailto] to see how you can get the box to a developer. By the way, no matter who you end up donating it to, it's an awesome gesture on your part. Good on ya.

    • Re:How about giving it to these guys.... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yes, OpenBSD is good for the whole free software at large.

      They were the ones that convinced us all to ditch telnet, and they did so by providing a feasable alternative. They've worked hard to convince wireless vendors to open their firmware, and gotten results. They were also one of the first groups to switch to X.Org. I guess what I'm trying to say is they have very high principles.

      Recently, Theo de Raadt won an award from the FSF for his work.

      I can't think of a better group to give it to. Unfortunt
    • i agree, the openbsd project make some great software (not just for openbsd either).

  • Give it to RedHat - they obviously need one.

    They released some VERY buggy SMP kernels over the weekend. Both FC3 and FC4 are horribly affected.
    Friends and I have had to revert back to the older kernels as most (all?) dual-proc or hyperthread systems would panic on boot!
    There are dozens of complaints and unanswered questions on fedoraforum. They must not have tested them under a dual-proc system at all.

    The most amazing part is, they haven't released a new SMP kernel to fix the problem yet! (these came out
  • If you live in Eastern PA you know as well as I do that the Philly school district is underfunded and poor childeren have little technology in the schools.

  • Donating hardware is too much of a hassle (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cerberusss ( 660701 ) on Friday July 22, 2005 @02:31AM (#13132881) Journal
    Why don't you put the thing on eBay, selling for the highest bidder. Then find your favourite project on sourceforge and donate via Paypal?

    I'm a developer and I often use Meld [sourceforge.net], a diff/merge tool. I also am an avid vim [vim.org] user. So every now and then I donate a few bucks to these worthy projects.

  • Damn, I need more coffee. I read the headline as "How can I detonate old hardware...".
  • I think that's the model - a DEC MIPS r3000 (I believe) that runs ultrix 4.2a and also netbsd.

    I'm getting ready to move to a new apartment and this thing has been sitting here unused for some 10 yrs now! anyone want one? it has 'full' memory in it (48meg, I think?) and a 1gig drive with ultrix preloaded. I might even have the ultrix cdroms and cdrom reader, too (DECs weird caddy version).

    probably too expensive to ship (I have the 16" display for it too). located in mtn view, ca.
    • man the 3000 runnin ultrix, brings back memories; coincedently also from 1995.

      Say, is that you Bob?
      • bob's not here, man...

        I started on a DECstation 3000. it was when I worked at DEC, back in maynard, around the late 80's.

        I think the 1gb scsi1 HP drive in there costed me $600 when I bought it brand new at frys. I was happy as hell to have 'a full gig' of storage, too. and I found someone on ebay to sell me the special DEC memory to bring it from 32meg (I think that's all it had) up to 48meg. ethernet is AUI only, which means 10base5... yes, I can convert it to thinwire (10base2) or even 10baseT.

  • It usually is pretty simple... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wolf31o2 ( 778801 ) on Friday July 22, 2005 @04:16PM (#13138782)
    Gentoo, for one, takes hardware donations. The donated hardware could become any number of things, from a new bittorrent server, to a developer's workstation. Another thing we offer is online developer machines, which gives remote access to the machines for developers in need. I am sure that Gentoo is not the only project out there with a similar way of handling donations. I know that FreeBSD has their own donations page. Pretty much any community-based project will gladly take your donation and put it to good use. In fact, it might be easier to find a project you would like to donate it to, rather than an individual. The project would probably do a better job of finding your machine a good home within its own structure than you probably would be able to without being intimately familiar with who does what and who needs what within the project.
  • Man I gotta upgrade...
  • You don't have to 'give' the box to anyone to put it to good use.
    Drop the distributed computing project of your choice on it, hook up a wireless networking card to it and store it somewhere out of the way.

    There are lots of worthy DC projects out there.
    I leave my PC on 24/7 crunching numbers folding and I know my electric bill is about $25 more then it could be if I was turning my PC off every month. I am considering that my contribution to charity.

    Just a thought.

    Donating a rig to a charity is a wonderfu

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