If so, how do you choose which ones to donate to? Do you prefer regular or recurring donations? What payment methods do you like to use?
I'm a programmer. I have created, maintained and contributed to many open source projects over 40 years. That's my donation.
I never give money: I give my time - like for example I'm a volunteer at our local association for the blind - and I give non-commercial things like my blood, used clothing, used toys or food. And to repay the other developers whose work I enjoy everyday, I donate code that I strive to make as good as possible.
The reason I never give money is because the money - part or all - invariably ends up in someone's pocket other than the intended recipient. When it's legal, it's called "overhead". Still, legal or not, and justified or not, I'm not interested in paying for that.
Whilst I do understand that sentiment, with our project we have made as much effort as possible to make sure that nobody thinks we would ever do such a thing.
We are rather tight fisted with our donations and make sure we only spend them when absolutely necessary - none of it goes out as regular stipends for the team and all funds for expenses get sent in response to the actual bills incurred, I don't think any of us would dream of siphoning it into our pockets.
We were even debating if we should use the "standard" funds to foot the bill for a new hosted service thing but felt this was a bit of a grey area - the service would be provided for free but footed by the donors of which only a small percentage would likely use it... We realise just how much of a privilege it is to be in receipt of the funds so we treat them with utmost reverence.
Not that I'm trying to encourage you to donate money to projects rather than time, I very much do the same as you and donate time and effort rather than money, but there are some good guys out there.
there are some good guys out there
I know that. But it's just a general rule at this point: I just don't give money. It's rarely satisfying to give money (and yes, the person doing the donation needs to feel good doing it too) and I just don't want to find out who deserves to get mine and who doesn't. I understand your sentiment too, but that's my personal rule. One has to draw the line somewhere: I'm not Mother Theresa and I reckon I contribute more than the average person to my local community. But I'm also free to donate what I want to donate, and money isn't part of what I want to donate.
That is more than fair enough, as said, not trying to get you to donate or anything, especially if you already donate your time. Just hoping to put something out there that some of us really do take the donations seriously and we try to be as transparent as possible with everything, I just wish more projects would do that to shake some of the potential mistrust.
I have to admit that I don't. I have done a couple of one-off donations before but I generally hope that my karma is balanced by some of the effort I put into helping out with a couple of projects.
That said, I've been utterly floored as to how generous the community has been with donating to one project I help with in particular. We added a donation platform with OpenCollective early on in the project but kind of hid the link away a little in the navbar, I thought we might get a tiny bit thrown at us every so often. When Distrotube did a video on us, one of the comments he made is that we should make the Donate button much more obvious, we did and now we have a whole bunch of super generous sponsors backing the project and making it possible. We keep the spending as open as we possibly can - it mostly goes into our backend hosting costs and website stuff and really does help it all stay alive.
Love hearing from devs that donations are coming into their projects, thank you for sharing that! Contributing time and expertise is just as important thank you for your contributions 🫡🫡🫡
I've set up a recurring donation for Signal, pay for a yearly Bitwarden subscription that I don't really need because the free tier covers my needs, so I consider it a donation, too, and throw some pocket money at some projects every new and then. oh and I have Mullvad and Tuta subscriptions.
I'll start, I donate to a few regularly via Github sponsors. I like that it's recurring. I also donate one-off to ones as I come across them, but generally donate regularly to software I use regularly, particularly if I somehow am using that software to make money. I really like the idea of a portion of my donation going to upstream libraries, though tbh I'm not confident if Github sponsors does that or not.
I mostly donate w Bitcoin, except Github sponsors since they don't take it. I also donate to a few orgs like EFF and OpenSats which are OSS-adjacent or help OSS tools I like exist. When I see apps I like have published a new release and they announce it on nostr, I usually send them a bit via zap as well, but most apps I use aren't on nostr.
I mostly donate w Bitcoin
Aren't there better coins with better privacy (which might be a helpful property , because being known as a generous person might make you a attractive target to charity scams attempts) and also much lower fees (monero? nano? , which reportedly has no fees) and faster transactions times? (if we are using digital currencies, we might as well try to support the best project by using it).
Look, I love privacy and I agree Bitcoin needs more of it. Many developers/OSS projects would have trouble using XMR, the off-ramps are few and far between. Bitcoin's privacy continues to get better and you can achieve significant degrees of anonymity with techniques like coinjoin etc. Lightning is pretty opaque, all the data on chain is who you opened your lightning channel with, not ANY of the transaction data between you and any other party (and remember, a single lightning channel can route payments to any other lightning user). And you can run a lightning node/wallet on an android. Long-term Bitcoin could absorb Monero's entire market cap by simply copying its privacy features into a future protocol upgrade, which I hope it does as it has with experimental protocol changes first tried on other blockchains. And the Bitcoin community seems very pro-privacy.
Monero has no functional L2 and only has "low fees" because it doesn't have the tx volume to get higher fees. Bitcoin has had a functional L2 for 5+ years now. Lightning fees are usually a penny or two per transaction, if sending large amounts, an on-chain tx is still only like $1.50 most of the time. Settlement on Monero takes minutes instead of less than a second on lightning, not that it matters for this particular use case. It doesn't have nearly the network of developers, users, or other people in the ecosystem backing it. Monero also has larger variable-sized blocks. Larger block sizes = more hardware requirements to run a node = more centralization. Bitcoin already had that debate and every other debate and chose decentralization at every turn. Monero chose bigger blocks just like Bitcoin cash did. Bigger block is not a scalable solution while remaining decentralized. No thanks. All of humanity's transactions shouldn't be stored on the blockchain for eternity, that is incredibly inefficient and needless. Nano has similar problems with design, no way to compensate those who run the infrastructure for the network, and pretty much nobody using it, and probably a massive pre-mine.
There are some fundamental problems to blockchain, digital currency, or decentralized ledgers. If you want a decentralized ledger, space is your biggest limitation. If you want more space, you get more centralization. Every other coin chose more space for "lower fees" or "faster transactions", Bitcoin chose decentralization at every possible turn (at the cost of having less space) and will continue to do so. For me, that is bar none the most important factor. And now it also has "fast transactions" and "low fees" thanks to L2s.
I wish I could donate to many software projects I rely on regularly. Unfortunately I barely make a living now and being in a developing country makes donations hard to do with all the fees and regulations, as well as the difference in currency (1 dollar is 7-ish of our currency). I still feel guilty about not being able to do that. But maybe in the future I'll be able assuage that guilt. I am learning how to code though and can already make some things. I'll look into contributing code when I feel I can do that.
I’ve given one time donations to many. Mostly gaming and MiSTer related. I currently donate monthly to lemmy.
I have a monthly budget that I pay recurring charges out of, a couple hundred USD a year give or take.
I also do a lot of one-off donations to various projects and creators.
I also have some FOSS software/services that I pay monthly for premium features on, like Bitwarden, Proton, and Podverse.
at the beginning of the month, I donate 5-10% of what I have in my bank account to whichever project I like to support atm. this month, a really nice symfonium update dropped and I like the direction KDE is going, so this is where my money will go to in 5 days
Yes I have setup recurring donations for some projects that really do ease up and save me so much time, although I don't think that this should be the way to keep OSS projects alive at the end of day.
If we let it companies will outsource this responsibility to us, even when often in the current economy they are the biggest profiteers from OSS and adjacent projects.
I donate to neovim and endeavour os, I would also donate to awesome / whatever tiling manager I currently use as it just saves me so much time (and literal pain in my case by reducing the use of the mouse).
These people are doing great job in maintaining systems that are easy to use, fast and very customizable, making actually using my computer enjoyable as opposed to the slow, non accessible, bloated UIs from other OSs
Yeah, I make a comfortable living doing software, and having kids didn't work out. So I give out a few hundred bucks a year spread across the likes of Gnome, KDE, Mozilla, and some one off donations to smaller projects that end up saving me some time. Free software costs me more than proprietary software. Haha. (Well, unless I factor in the software I use for work... Then not even close O_o)
I get the impression that maybe the money sent to Mozilla might be a waste though. :-\
Sent $500 to FOSS projects one month.
Banned from /r/Linux on BlackFriday for making a post trying to make Linux BF deals a thing and clear our reputation as a non-market.
Fuck you CAP_WHATEVER_JERK_NAME
In any case it demonstrated to me
#1. Fuck Reddit
#2. Fuck communities that are not autonomous with the power spread out.
10/10 would do again.
Edit: Also CAP -- that friend who was diagnosed with cancer that same day is now deceased, thanks for showing me your lack of humanity & decency over petty bullshit. That shit catches up with you fast trust me.
I keep recurring donations to big projects like KDE and one time once in a while to smaller projects/devs. There's no incentive for me to donate a dollar to someone who wrote an app to control the flash but a one time donation is good. One time donation is also good for projects you just check out and think it's good. Projects I heavily use also get a regular donation. And I didn't sit down and looked up every project but I star everything on github at first and then after a while I donate. A star is the minimum I do for good projects
