21
votes
Does something like a charity fund for FOSS exist? If not, do you think it could be a good idea?
There are a lot of awesome open source projects that I'd love to donate to, however, I can't afford to donate to all of them.
It would be great if there was something like a charity fund (eg. GiveWell), but for FOSS. So a lot of people donate to it, and it distributes all collected money between some curated projects (most influential/important/promising/underfunded/etc.).
Do you know if something like this already exists? if not, could it potentially be a good idea to do? It seems like the idea of donating to open-source is currently more prominent in the community due to the xz backdoor thing.
Lots of projects individually ask for donations via their own choice of third-party provider.
The trouble with a unified system is I'm doubtful there could be fair administration that wouldn't be manipulated or corrupted, because humans.
Personally, I just pick a few of my most valuable software, and donate to those, especially if their dev teams are very small.
The unfortunate thing is this leaves out all the "not" valuable software, which is obviously coloured by visibility.
There's an XKCD about that
Hardly anyone knows about what their stack actually depends on. I certainly don't. It would be great if someone, ideally a well-known someone with a good reputation, could help me out in making sure that that random person in Nebraska can keep that project going while still feeding his family.
Something similar is thanks.dev: it scans your projects' dependency trees, then you "donate" a set amount of money and it distributes it among the dependencies you use.
Although I think it's more common for people to donate to specific projects, as others have mentioned.
You could also donate to a non-profit foundation, such as Mozilla, Wikipedia, or Creative Commons. Sometimes these groups will select and donate to open-source projects themselves; for example, the Mozilla Technology Fund "supports open source technologists whose work furthers promising approaches to solving pressing issues".
There is Tidelift, among others. I'm not able to give an authoritative opinion about whether or not it's any good, unfortunately.
There was a discussion about an idea for donating to FOSS projects on Lemmy about 2 months ago: https://iusearchlinux.fyi/post/4508368
Gutted this isn't iusearchlinux.btw
This centralized curation is a tricky problem. Although there have been many interesting systems like Snowdrift.coop, most of these projects are either not very successful or the money flows are biased towards a specific group of people.
Then don't. A few large direct donations will do more good than many small donations even while it might feel like you are doing more good.
Donate to the projects that you like or use the most. If everyone did that then we would enjoy the benefits of decentralized curation.
Amazing that snowdrift has been under development since 2016, and still seems to be active on some level, without ever managing to give money to a project other than itself.
For sure. I think they didn't have enough momentum and kind of fizzled out? Perhaps delayed and flawed by perfectionism. Every.org seems to have taken the opposite approach but now it is a platform with actual active users. It would be interesting if they could experiment with monetary instruments like cooperative donating, etc.
I like the work that https://numfocus.org/ is doing. I think there is some hope for collective style of non-profit administration. But a lot of volunteers and non-profits don't have the time, prestige, or the portfolio to onboard with a successful collective. I write open-source software and I really enjoy doing it. It's a lot more fun than applying for jobs and hearing nothing back so I'll probably just keep doing it regardless of donations and the number of lentils in my cupboard.
The creator of
brewis working onteawhich is supposed to be a package manage that helps library authors get paid for their work:https://tea.xyz/