Opensource

The makers of the OSS having an actual forum instead of a fucking worthless Discord server. That's why I dropped Bazzite and donated to Linux Mint.

I support very few open source projects because ultimately charity is not a sustainable way of financing things. It makes me feel like it’s up to me, an individual, to carry the weight of the world and ultimately too depressing. Fostering open source should be handled by governments, same as other stuff that’s done due to common interest, like schools and hospitals.

Having enough disposable income.

I donate to a number of free-software projects via https://liberapay.com/ which lets me control the individual donation amounts and frequencies, and pay from a single account that I top up periodically.

When approached about allowing me to donate to them via Liberapay, I've had several people respond positively and set up their end of the deal. It often just takes a friendly conversation.

If there was a single solution that provided the following:

• allow me to donate a set, reoccurring, monthly sum. I.e $20, 40, 60, etc, to 1 service
• that service would then allow me to add "sub-services" like nixos, postmarketos, firefox, whatever, and it would split out my lum sum between all the subservices.
• the service was 100% transparent, vetting, and vouched for, with paper trails showing the money actually went to the sub services and how much of a cut they take.
• if it offered a local only program or app that would analyze what projects I used (its easy to forget about all the packages that linchpin everything we use) to help offer me suggestions on who I could donate to.

Basically a Spotify for open source, but instead of basing it on my listen history and contracts with record labels, let me choose manually how my subscription payment is split out.

I keep meaning to take a deeper look at open collective, but haven't found the time or had anyone else (donator or developer) share their experiences.

Transparency. I dont donate to projects that dont regularily (monthly/quarterly) publish the amount of money they receive through donations and their costs.

An example of how to do this well here https://tchncs.de/en/donate

Doesnt need to be that fancy of course, can just be a table with numbers.

Is there some sort of "index fund" for open source software. I use tons of open source software and intermittently sprinkle one time donations on certain projects. I'd rather have it simplified and donate regularly to a foundation that spreads the funds fairly to big projects and small ones and one that I might not use but benefit the world at large.

Knowing where my money will make the best impact. Like I know there's a lot tools and libraries that hold up the world, but which ones need the help? Which ones don't?

Basically, it’s a cognitive nuke.

Okay, this piece of software is worth $5/mo to me. But it’s basically just a wrapper around this library, so I guess most of it should go to the base library? But the wrapper’s author is very active in the development of the library, so that swings it back in their favor.

But none of this would be possible without Framework X, so maybe that deserves a big chunk. But most of the contributors to that are for-profit companies that just wanna leverage OSS for free patches.

Oh and look at that, there’s a milestone issue in the wrapper’s issue tracker saying they wanna switch frameworks. Oh, and another issue asking if the project is dead because it’s just dependabot merges recently.

I used to think I would donate 100% to software with my leftover money. Which is still true to a large extent but nowadays I feel like the real value for open source to succeed is not software, but hardware. We have significant amount of momentum in the software space and it would be wise for us to develop an opensource alternative to the industry with a good hardware base for {Desktop, Server, Mobile} with mobile being the most difficult to enter what with licenses to be obtained for closed source SIM Card drivers.

That said, what's holding me back right now is that inflation is biting all of us in the ass and it seems prudent not to give away money in the off-chance that "What if I need it for some random expense?".

I wish I could contribute my time in open source but between work, health and social obligations there's hardly any time or interest left to be excited to open up the text editor for a coding sesh at 9.30 pm in the evening, especially when video games, movies or fun with the spouse are the competing activities.

Edit: On pressing the button to publish my comment I felt incredibly foolish as server is already a won space I reckon. Even desktop is fine i guess, only problem is mobile right now.

Comparison with closed source software sometimes does. If I installed windows I would pay nothing. If I got a computer with Windows preinstalled I would pay a price premium less than $50, perhaps even negative. And buying it from Microsoft costs significantly more. So how much should I pay Arch? Paying $50 for something I get for free feels like I'm being had.

You might say that I can then pay smaller amounts regularly. But aren't subscriptions shunned when it's for closed source software?

Then who should I donate to? I've donated to Arch, Kde and the lemmy instances I use. But what about like Linux itself? Browsers I use? The weather app? Upstream libraries of those projects? How much should each get? Kde already gets more money than they can spend. Should the amount be based on how much value I receive or how much they need it?

And once those are decided then I need to find how to donate. It's easier to just not

Okay, I am pretty extreme in my views of genAI in coding, so take me with a pillar of salt, but I'd need to be sure the devs and contributions ain't vibe coded bullshit or that the people doing it actually understand what the hell their software actually does, not just code wise and not just some genAI explanation of what the code does either. Then I'd feel a little more comfortable donating in today's day and age.

Last thing we need are people using genAI to code and then 2 generations later nobody actually knows how to code because they've all destroyed their brains and lost their human status to genAI.

I've contributed code. After doing that, donating is a much simpler decision to make.

I think I'd have a hard time picking out single projects to support. I sometimes do one-time donations to things I like (for example I donated to LocalSend one time when I discovered it and liked it a lot).

I have a regular donation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation though, which I feel sort of covers the same area in a more general sense.

Ah, the joys of being Brazilian... cries in equivalent 850USD/month salary

The main things I'd end up donating to are alternative operating systems or people making emulators/software for them, like AROS, Kolibri, Haiku or ReactOS

I'm already pretty broke and throw projects I like some money here or there. Usually $10-$20 or so. Like a beer or two at the pub.

Liking the software.

Yeah I donate to the KDE and Debian projects as I use them a bunch and I'd like these projects to keep going so supporting them financially makes sense to me. Not a massive amount only a tenner a month in each case so I doubt I'm having a huge amount of impact in their finances but at this point they've both got more out of me than any proprietary project ever did.

Technically, nothing. I do not get much of disposable income and I did donate to 2 projects that are my favorites. Others are on the way, but not sure when I will be able to in near future. I really want to support them.

What would stop me from donating is frequency of how I use that particular project. Say, I run uptime kuma. In reality I barely use it and no one except me even knows that I run one. I might as well just disable it and nothing would change in my setup. There is not a single service integral to my setup that I need to inform my users (there are like 2.5) to check uptime of.

As another example, Tailscale will skip my donation. A useful thing, yes. They have paid memberships and their free tier is barebones WG setup that is just easy to do. They are getting paid by commerial users. They dont need my 50 euros as much as say Jellyfin does.

The other point to skip donating would be vibe coding. I doubt vibe coding project will be updated enough, will be secure, and generally a solid projects. Everything I've seen so far is either abandoned fast, has some major vulnerabilities, or does something that other projects have already figured out. I skip even trying these.

Other than that, if I'd have a disposable income that I can spend on anything, I'd donate to all (F)OSS that I use. The community rocks and we should support good software anyway.

I wouldn't donate to projects that are already well-funded, or to foundations that spend a lot of money on the support of outside projects (I'd rather fund such projects directly, if I see them worthy).

Overall, I would prioritize small to medium projects that need funding the most. For example, I would donate to Lemmy, but not Mastodon.

Aside from that, I also care about actual openness of the project (i.e. free participation in its improvement), a strong open-source ethos, and independence from corporate backing.