
Ask HN: How to donate $1k to open source? - schafele
Let&#x27;s consider I am a company and I want to donate 1000$ for Open Source projects and Open Source libraries as I am using them heavily. What can I do?<p>Option 1: Pick my favorite project and send them 1000$ -&gt; simple but only one project benefits from my donation
Option 1: Find projects or libs I am using and accept donations, use their donation systems, distribute the 1000$ -&gt; very time consuming and cumbersome, I have to use different systems, but can support multiple projects. Unfortunately, the donation for one project will be quite small as it is just a fraction of the donation of 1000$.<p>Do you know any platforms or good solutions to distribute the 1000$ or support Open Source so that the 1000$ is used as effectively as possible?
======
samspenc
I would like to slightly disagree with some of the posts here that say $1000
may be too small or not have much of an impact...

I think of it this way, no matter what you give, it's a great start. While I
have open-sourced some of my apps and libraries, none of them got popular
(except for one CakePHP plugin that had all of 64 stars and as many forks on
GitHub way back in the day). But I think I would be excited with whatever
folks donated, it's a shot in the arm, and more than the money, a validation
that something I did contributed positively to society and was useful to
someone else.

Secondly, if 1000 people thought like you did and donated $1000 each ...
that's $1 million there, enough to hire 5-10 folks to work full-time on that
project. And if all the big cos (I'm looking at you, FAANG) could donate five
or six figure dollar amounts to all the open source projects they use (a
rounding error in their annual revenue / incomes), open source might actually
be a sustainable model, and a win-win for everybody.

------
feross
If you use Node.js, then you can run `npx thanks` to see which of your
dependencies are seeking financial support.

Demo GIF:
[https://github.com/feross/thanks/blob/master/img/example.gif](https://github.com/feross/thanks/blob/master/img/example.gif)

GitHub repo:
[https://github.com/feross/thanks](https://github.com/feross/thanks)

P.S. I am accepting donations here:
[https://feross.org/thanks/](https://feross.org/thanks/)

------
andrefuchs
How about using GitHub Sponsors, OpenCollective or Patreon?

[https://github.com/sponsors](https://github.com/sponsors)
[https://opencollective.com](https://opencollective.com)
[https://www.patreon.com](https://www.patreon.com)

~~~
schafele
thanks andrefuchs for the links, I wasn't aware of OpenCollective. If I get it
correctly I still have to manually find all collectives that I want to support
and send them money. So if I want to support 100 projects and I'll have to do
100 transactions?

~~~
jermaustin1
Donating to 100 projects will be hard to manage, and with only $1000, it would
be better to give that to 2-5 projects at most, since $10 would barely cover a
month of hosting.

It is noble to want to help 100 projects, but with limited funds, it would go
further on only a couple projects. Think, new laptop, a few months of their
CI/CD service, etc.

------
IvanK_net
I would recommend to choose one library, that is especially important to you,
and that you think could be underpaid, and send it to them directly. If
everybody does so, other libs will get paid by other donors.

I would recommend to avoid services, which "redistribute" donations. Such
companies need to keep a part of money for themselves as running costs, and it
is often not clear, if they keep 1% or 90%. And the way they decide who gets
what, also might not be clear. I am not saying they are corrupted. I am just
saying the transparency is lost with each "man in the middle".

~~~
schafele
I agree, that is definitely a good way to donate money. It is just that I
heard "The software that is the easiest to build -- the software that is the
easiest to fund the development of -- tends to serve those who are already
extremely well-served." in
[https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/capitalismethicaloss/](https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/capitalismethicaloss/)
and I thought that there might be a smater way to "redistribute" the money.

------
fsflover
One possibility is to donate to Free Software Foundation [0]. They are very
efficient [1] and they support many FOSS projects [2].

[0] [https://www.fsf.org/](https://www.fsf.org/)

[1]
[https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...](https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=8557)

[2]
[https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Free_Software_Directory:About](https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Free_Software_Directory:About)

------
markvdb
Umbrella organisations would do. There's FSF, FSFE, Software in the Public
interest, Software Freedom Conservancy, and more.

...or ... <shameless plug>You're always welcome to give it to us:
[https://fosdem.org/2020/support/donate/](https://fosdem.org/2020/support/donate/)
:-) </shameless plug>

FOSDEM is a huge yearly free and open source developer conference since 20
years. Have a look through our video archives to get an idea of what you'd be
supporting.

P.S. Our overhead is basicly zero because we're all volunteers.

Edit: s/meta/umbrella/

~~~
einpoklum
The Free Software Foundation is not just a meta organization: It's the
organization behind GNU! and GNU is a _lot_ of free, and many fundamental,
piece of software.

Donate to them here:

[https://my.fsf.org/donate/](https://my.fsf.org/donate/)

~~~
markvdb
I do know the work of the FSF fairly well and respect it. My comment was in no
way meant to belittle their achievement, quite to the contrary! Feel free to
s/meta organisation/umbrella organisation/ or whatever sounds more accurate a
description to you.

------
jrockway
I think you need to be more specific about what your goals are. Is there a
particular project that you make heavy use of? Is there a particular area of
projects that you care about? Is there a particular ideology that you care
about?

In terms of impact, paying for $1000 worth of consulting on an open source
project that you use is probably where it's at. "I really want bug #1234
fixed." Pay someone $1000 and it's fixed. (For a bug that takes a day or so to
fix, that is.)

~~~
jonas_kgomo
would you welcome a platform that specifically open bounties on issues?

------
scrollaway
If you were to donate $1000 to "open source", not much would actually get
anywhere useful IMO.

On top of this, as a company, donating is… complicated. If you can do it,
great, but it's often easier to find a project that has a support contract and
pay for that. It gives you a real and justified expense and is in general more
stable income for the devs.

Furthermore, a renewable contract gives the project _predictable_ income,
which is instrinsically worth more to the project.

If you have $1k and just want to give it away once, _and_ want it to end up in
open source, I think what's best is you pick your personal favourite project
and double check they both need and can take the money (then move down the
list if they don't). But if you can afford to give a recurring donation, go
that route instead! Patreon is a good avenue for smaller projects that don't
necessarily offer contracts of their own, but at that point there's a lot of
money that goes into their fee.

Edit: Another potential avenue is donating directly to a developer for their
open source work (Github Sponsors will let you do that), assuming there's a
dev you like a lot for that.

~~~
jermaustin1
As a company, I typically find donating to a company/foss/whatever that
"advertises" their donors is the best way to give them money, and it be an
advertising expense.

~~~
einpoklum
"Best" for your company's business interests? :-(

~~~
myself248
I took it as "best" in "most likely to actually reach a person who can write a
check" in the corporate bureaucracy.

In most of the companies I'm familiar with, it's very hard for engineers and
their managers to spend money on things that don't have a tangible return,
particularly something you can stick an inventory tag on.

Marketing departments, on the other hand, are purpose-built to spend money on
intangible things.

I've coached a high-school robotics program that's mostly funded out of the
company's marketing budget, which they justify because the students put logos
on their machines. Everyone knows we're doing it because we think it's
awesome, but we have to call it marketing to slip it past the beancounters.

~~~
fgonzag
I know you probably agree with me, but supporting an open source project your
company's infrastructure depends on has a tangible return (better maintenance
on the project). It's just that managers don't see it that way.

------
einpoklum
Well, as far as the time-consumption you could try Randomization:

Decide what fraction you want to give each of several projects (or make it
uniform-probability), and partition the range [0,1] by those fractions. Now
draw a random number between 0 and 1 (you can do this online if you like);
give the $1000 to the project in whose range you've drawn.

I'm not saying that's such a great idea, but the expected donation to each
project remains the same (well, depends on some ontological considerations I
suppose).

------
jonas_kgomo
@feross published an experiment on funding mechanisms on opensource.
[https://feross.org/funding-experiment-recap/](https://feross.org/funding-
experiment-recap/)

My suggestions for now would be BountySource (great for micro-financing on
issues) and GitCoin (great for crypto-payments)

------
valgor
I'm not sure if your scenario is completely hypothetical and you are limited
to $1000, but if you are a company and not an individual, why not hire someone
with the intention that he or she will work heavily on OSS that you require in
your organization?

------
michael-ax
You can also donate for articles or factoids that people shared -- which
helped you in your own work or field. If you want to keep this human-scale
with a high impact potential for both parties. That gets lost when you give to
.orgs

~~~
schafele
what are good platforms for that?

------
slyall
There are some organisations that handle paperwork for many open source
projects. You can donate to these and mark you donations for specific projects
or towards "overhead".

The two I've donated to are

Software in the Public Interest ( [https://www.spi-inc.org/](https://www.spi-
inc.org/) )

The Software Conservancy (
[https://sfconservancy.org/](https://sfconservancy.org/) )

------
tunesmith
How about a maven plugin that searches for libs in your pom that registered in
a db (put together by a service), and creates a mutual-fund sort of thing that
you can donate to, to be distributed later? When I was in an investment club
the portfolio of stocks we bought was something any of us could collectively
buy into, for any amount.

Then more plugins could be written for gradle, npm, etc.

------
surfertas
Use [https://www.korabo.io](https://www.korabo.io).

Core contributors to an OSS project can decide on percentage share allocation
and create a credit card checkout that is accessible via a shield button. The
donations/proceeds would be split on a per payment basis.

At the moment the application only handles those with a US-based account.

------
xvilka
I would consider to donate not to the IT tools but the domain specific
software. It's often undervalued, underrepresented, and underfunded. Science,
engineering, literature/music/art creation, etc. I believe, these are in the
need more than IT, also have a bigger impact to the society.

------
mapcars
>Unfortunately, the donation for one project will be quite small as it is just
a fraction of the donation of 1000$.

>Do you know any platforms or good solutions to distribute the 1000$

Well every project will get a part of it regardless of how you do it :D

>very time consuming and cumbersome

If you really care and want to donate this should not stop you.

------
alexnavis
Just curious to understand how do you currently do ?. Does OpenCollective
solve your problem ?.

Apart from individual/company liked projects and you can consider foundations
like apache, mozilla which have contributed a lot to the community..

------
zanderz
[https://sfconservancy.org](https://sfconservancy.org)

I almost got my employer to donate to them and have a staff member give us a
presentation. That fell apart, but it's a thing that can happen.

------
rodrigods
Just a suggestion: you could donate "time", which probably could be valued
much more than $1k:

\- Contributing back the changes you've made (if any)

\- Improving official documentation

\- Writing blog posts on how you used the project

\- Taking some time to fix upstream open bugs

------
wdroz
There is a list of open source organizations here[0].

[0] --
[https://opensource.com/resources/organizations](https://opensource.com/resources/organizations)

~~~
schafele
Thanks for the info. But then again, I am not sure what they are doing with my
money right? So is there a platform which distributes my money to those people
who work on those projects and libs that I am using - Without checking
everything manually.

------
moltar
Open source collective Patreon

------
fros1y
Tidelift

