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.
Matrix, Deltachat, Nextcloud more then enough, they can not more even with money
Wikimedia, and wikipedia, also firefox
AntennaPod states this on their website
AntennaPod doesn’t need a lot of money. Our (annual) costs are already covered by our existing donation funds. Therefore, we’d much prefer it if you
- donate to your favorite podcast(er), or
- help us with a non-monetary contribution.
Wikipedia could learn from their decency
Wikipedia is amazing, and I have donated to them a number of times. But something just rubs me the wrong way about their current donation drive and anything I read about how much their higher ups are getting paid makes no sense to me. Why are the salaries so high? Where is the clear breakdown of server cost and infrastructure?
Jellyfin has explicitly asked that people find other places to donate to: https://opencollective.com/jellyfin/updates/were-good-seriously
Reading the first lines I was gonna say just cause their operating costs are covered doesn’t mean they should refuse more donations, because they could use the money to hire people to fix their garbage software.
But they cleared that up further down where they suggest donating to Jellyfin clients instead, which are indeed the biggest problem at the moment.
Hopefully it will one day become a viable Plex alternative for people that are sharing their server with “normie” users, and not just users that are technologically inclined and willing to use external Android TV boxes instead of hoping their SmartTV has a Jellyfin client available for it that isn’t hot garbage
Eh? TV boxes? Just use a web brower. What is a TV box?
Do you not have a TV? I’ve watched stuff on my monitor, sure, but sitting on the couch watching TV is what the vast majority of people do.
Unless you mean connecting your computer to your TV? I did this for awhile, there are ways to make it work, but I much prefer using a Chromecast or similar device to simplify the whole interaction.
to simplify the whole interaction
and watch video in full HD.
Well I think of the people who have 4K stuff (I don’t), there’s probably a lot of gamers who have 4K monitors by not TVs? Just guessing, IDK 🤷♂️
I do see a mention in that post about instead supporting the jellyfin client developers. They give this page as a reference for who to support based on which client you use.
Thanks for sharing this.
same with antennapod
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.
Their only defence is to support other mediawiki projects, but it is ambiguous we don’t know how the money goes. The project, whatever that is, should speak for itself instead of going through Wikipedia.
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?
To me that still shows most doesn’t go where you think, especially when volunteers do the hard work.
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.
Because when they ask that, people say wikipedia or firefox and not things like archive
That’s a different question.
What makes it a different question, I’m ignorant and ask that you explain
Not OP but I would say because it is a smaller list where if you want to donate and make a big difference to the project then you know it is good to give money to pretty much anyone other than the over funded ones.
firefox I guess actually has enough funding
leverage inc should, make it happen…
Mozilla is losing the vast majority of its funding soon with the Google antitrust situation
You know hyo cares about whatevever inc? no-one, so yep
