[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How to donate $1k to open source?
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Ask HN: How to donate $1k to open source?
Let's consider I am a company and I want to donate 1000$ for Open
Source projects and Open Source libraries as I am using them
heavily. What can I do? Option 1: Pick my favorite project and
send them 1000$ -> simple but only one project benefits from my
donation Option 1: Find projects or libs I am using and accept
donations, use their donation systems, distribute the 1000$ -> very
time consuming and cumbersome, I have to use different systems, but
can support multiple projects. Unfortunately, the donation for one
project will be quite small as it is just a fraction of the
donation of 1000$. Do you know any platforms or good solutions to
distribute the 1000$ or support Open Source so that the 1000$ is
used as effectively as possible?
Author : schafele
Score : 19 points
Date : 2020-02-14 11:11 UTC (11 hours ago)
| markvdb wrote:
| Umbrella organisations would do. There's FSF, FSFE, Software in
| the Public interest, Software Freedom Conservancy, and more.
|
| ...or ... <shameless plug>You're always welcome to give it to us:
| https://fosdem.org/2020/support/donate/ :-) </shameless plug>
|
| FOSDEM is a huge yearly free and open source developer conference
| since 20 years. Have a look through our video archives to get an
| idea of what you'd be supporting.
|
| P.S. Our overhead is basicly zero because we're all volunteers.
|
| Edit: s/meta/umbrella/
| einpoklum wrote:
| The Free Software Foundation is not just a meta organization:
| It's the organization behind GNU! and GNU is a _lot_ of free,
| and many fundamental, piece of software.
|
| Donate to them here:
|
| https://my.fsf.org/donate/
| markvdb wrote:
| I do know the work of the FSF fairly well and respect it. My
| comment was in no way meant to belittle their achievement,
| quite to the contrary! Feel free to s/meta
| organisation/umbrella organisation/ or whatever sounds more
| accurate a description to you.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Well, as far as the time-consumption you could try Randomization:
|
| Decide what fraction you want to give each of several projects
| (or make it uniform-probability), and partition the range [0,1]
| by those fractions. Now draw a random number between 0 and 1 (you
| can do this online if you like); give the $1000 to the project in
| whose range you've drawn.
|
| I'm not saying that's such a great idea, but the expected
| donation to each project remains the same (well, depends on some
| ontological considerations I suppose).
| IvanK_net wrote:
| I would recommend to choose one library, that is especially
| important to you, and that you think could be underpaid, and send
| it to them directly. If everybody does so, other libs will get
| paid by other donors.
|
| I would recommend to avoid services, which "redistribute"
| donations. Such companies need to keep a part of money for
| themselves as running costs, and it is often not clear, if they
| keep 1% or 90%. And the way they decide who gets what, also might
| not be clear. I am not saying they are corrupted. I am just
| saying the transparency is lost with each "man in the middle".
| schafele wrote:
| I agree, that is definitely a good way to donate money. It is
| just that I heard "The software that is the easiest to build --
| the software that is the easiest to fund the development of --
| tends to serve those who are already extremely well-served." in
| https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/capitalismethicaloss/
| and I thought that there might be a smater way to
| "redistribute" the money.
| scrollaway wrote:
| If you were to donate $1000 to "open source", not much would
| actually get anywhere useful IMO.
|
| On top of this, as a company, donating is... complicated. If you
| can do it, great, but it's often easier to find a project that
| has a support contract and pay for that. It gives you a real and
| justified expense and is in general more stable income for the
| devs.
|
| Furthermore, a renewable contract gives the project _predictable_
| income, which is instrinsically worth more to the project.
|
| If you have $1k and just want to give it away once, _and_ want it
| to end up in open source, I think what 's best is you pick your
| personal favourite project and double check they both need and
| can take the money (then move down the list if they don't). But
| if you can afford to give a recurring donation, go that route
| instead! Patreon is a good avenue for smaller projects that don't
| necessarily offer contracts of their own, but at that point
| there's a lot of money that goes into their fee.
|
| Edit: Another potential avenue is donating directly to a
| developer for their open source work (Github Sponsors will let
| you do that), assuming there's a dev you like a lot for that.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| As a company, I typically find donating to a
| company/foss/whatever that "advertises" their donors is the
| best way to give them money, and it be an advertising expense.
| einpoklum wrote:
| "Best" for your company's business interests? :-(
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| That is small minded... It is best for all interests. I get
| a bonafide write-off, they get bonafide money.
|
| I also pay developers for a commercial licenses for FOSS
| offerings, if they are able, that I never intend on using
| because the project looked promising.
|
| I donate thousands of dollars a year between charities and
| open source software, Why wouldn't I do it in the most tax
| advantageous way?
| einpoklum wrote:
| So, you want to get advertising with money that you write off
| for tax purposes. In many world states that would constitute
| tax fraud. And have the reputation of those FOSS developers
| benefit you, to boot. I'm sorry, that's a bit much from a
| small mind such as mine.
| fsflover wrote:
| One possibility is to donate to Free Software Foundation [0].
| They are very efficient [1] and they support many FOSS projects
| [2].
|
| [0] https://www.fsf.org/
|
| [1]
| https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...
|
| [2] https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Free_Software_Directory:About
| mapcars wrote:
| >Unfortunately, the donation for one project will be quite small
| as it is just a fraction of the donation of 1000$.
|
| >Do you know any platforms or good solutions to distribute the
| 1000$
|
| Well every project will get a part of it regardless of how you do
| it :D
|
| >very time consuming and cumbersome
|
| If you really care and want to donate this should not stop you.
| samspenc wrote:
| I would like to slightly disagree with some of the posts here
| that say $1000 may be too small or not have much of an impact...
|
| I think of it this way, no matter what you give, it's a great
| start. While I have open-sourced some of my apps and libraries,
| none of them got popular (except for one CakePHP plugin that had
| all of 64 stars and as many forks on GitHub way back in the day).
| But I think I would be excited with whatever folks donated, it's
| a shot in the arm, and more than the money, a validation that
| something I did contributed positively to society and was useful
| to someone else.
|
| Secondly, if 1000 people thought like you did and donated $1000
| each ... that's $1 million there, enough to hire 5-10 folks to
| work full-time on that project. And if all the big cos (I'm
| looking at you, FAANG) could donate five or six figure dollar
| amounts to all the open source projects they use (a rounding
| error in their annual revenue / incomes), open source might
| actually be a sustainable model, and a win-win for everybody.
| moltar wrote:
| Open source collective Patreon
| wdroz wrote:
| There is a list of open source organizations here[0].
|
| [0] -- https://opensource.com/resources/organizations
| schafele wrote:
| Thanks for the info. But then again, I am not sure what they
| are doing with my money right? So is there a platform which
| distributes my money to those people who work on those projects
| and libs that I am using - Without checking everything
| manually.
| andrefuchs wrote:
| How about using GitHub Sponsors, OpenCollective or Patreon?
|
| https://github.com/sponsors https://opencollective.com
| https://www.patreon.com
| schafele wrote:
| thanks andrefuchs for the links, I wasn't aware of
| OpenCollective. If I get it correctly I still have to manually
| find all collectives that I want to support and send them
| money. So if I want to support 100 projects and I'll have to do
| 100 transactions?
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| Donating to 100 projects will be hard to manage, and with
| only $1000, it would be better to give that to 2-5 projects
| at most, since $10 would barely cover a month of hosting.
|
| It is noble to want to help 100 projects, but with limited
| funds, it would go further on only a couple projects. Think,
| new laptop, a few months of their CI/CD service, etc.
| michael-ax wrote:
| You can also donate for articles or factoids that people shared
| -- which helped you in your own work or field. If you want to
| keep this human-scale with a high impact potential for both
| parties. That gets lost when you give to .orgs
| schafele wrote:
| what are good platforms for that?
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(page generated 2020-02-14 23:00 UTC)