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?
pip-requirements-parser
strictyaml
pip-tools
These are all abandoned important Python packages
Is funding for a maintainer even an option?
The NetBSD Foundation can use some funding from Community.
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.
I’m glad you mentioned the open infrastructure projects. For example, I use some of the few remaining nitter/invidious/etc. servers.
As for free software projects I suggest donating your time with contributions.
Definitely. I’m already spending much of my spare time doing this.
Matrix, Deltachat, Nextcloud more they can do
Matrix? Are we going by volume or need? Cause i’m pretty sure they could use more funding.
Don’t get me wrong using the Matrix, etc. But! They constantly complain: there is no money, no money, money appears, problems are not solved as before. A simple infusion of money will not solve anything… Money for what?! There are a lot of similar projects that are conceived and managed by one person, only one, without an army of programmers, managers, managers, etc.
Wikimedia, and wikipedia, also firefox
