There were some posts over the holiday season asking for projects to donate to, and for those who have the means to comfortably do so, this is an important gift to consider.
If there’s only a limited amount each of us is able to give, I assume there’s no point giving it all to, for one example, The Linux Foundation, because a small personal donation is trivial next to the ~$15,000,000 USD they receive from sponsors dependent on them[1]. I understand that funding sources can be a major and profound source of bias[2] and ideally we would be, for example, helping to make Firefox independent of Google, but until we have more collective power, it’s not worth letting smaller important projects struggle instead.
So, which important projects should we leave to the sponsors, and which really need our support?
I’d recommend you donate money to those who host open infrastructure. That stuff is expensive and critical to the free and open internet.
As for free software projects I suggest donating your time with contributions. That’s what they need the most. Helping with bug reports and writing documentation are easy starters and worth much more than money. That’s hard to sell as a gift though… One gift card for confirming and investigating a bug in free software of choice. Merry Christmas Uncle Bob!
Going from being a cool hacker who does things for fun and share it with his peers to being a poor cyberbeggar does no good to a persons selfworth. Help out by contributing and let Mr. Cool Hacker have time for his day job on the side. We get better software and fewer burnouts.
Yes! Writing software has no barrier to entry besides skills. Hosting something costs.
Why do people ask questions like this? Isn’t, “Which worthwhile FOSS projects are underfunded?” a better way to say it?
It’s just so kludgy.
I feel like that list would be ridiculously long.
Maybe I can say Wikipedia because if it’s mediawiki software. Every year they ask for money but a lot of their funds don’t go towards the Wikipedia project.
Getting your ideas from Elon I see.
Did you even read what I said? Go look where their money goes, it’s mostly for random outreach programs.
58% goes to fundraising, administrative and technological costs. The rest has some money going towards, but no limited to, other programs.
Only thing I can find in their financials that would maybe qualify as “random outreach” would be “awards and grants”, at 26mil last year out of 185mil revenue, or 14%.
https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Community_Fund
As far as I can tell, it’s not particularly random.
Maybe I’m missing something?
