

DuckDuckGo FOSS Donations 2010 - jordanmessina
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/02/duckduckgo-foss-donations-2010.html

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cperciva
For the past two years I've donated all of Tarsnap's profits for December to
the FreeBSD Foundation. (Considerably more than 1/12th of the annual profits,
due to Tarsnap's growth -- last year it worked out to 15%.)

Good to see that I'm not alone. :-)

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karl11
At 10% of gross revenue, these donations would indicate DDG pulled in ~$19,090
in 2010.

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stanleydrew
This means the $7000 billboard on the 101 in San Francisco was a significant
portion of revenue. Gabriel, looking back on that, do you think it was worth
it, and would you advise other startups to try it given similar revenue
numbers?

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epi0Bauqu
Absolutely.

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axod
Presumably it's the sudden jump on Jan 3rd onward here? If so seems like money
well spent indeed.

<http://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html>

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callahad
Yet another great reason to use DDG. Similarly, Gandi's support of Debian is a
major reason I use them for all of my domain registrations.

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dotBen
I'm not sure what Gabriel's aspirations are for raising venture capital in the
future, but abstracting this out...

I'm wondering whether a VC would have concerns about investing in a startup
that had already made such a public commitment.

~~~
jdp23
Great question. I'm working on finding that out myself.

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jjm
I donated money AND sweat to half of these projects in addition to several
others personally, before I went and started my startup.

I hope people contribute outside of their 'corporate profits' both monetarily
and with some elbow grease.

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avar
This is fantastic, too bad you'd never see something like this from a company
on the stock market.

~~~
axod
I'm pretty sure hundreds of large companies make donations, allow employees
time to work on FOSS, and so on.

Still awesome to see duckduckgo do it of course.

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avar
They make donations. But they don't donate 10% of their yearly revenue, even
though their business often completely depends on FOSS software.

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axod
A company on the stock market owes it to investors to make _them_ a return.

Donating 10% of _revenue_ away, wouldn't go down too well with average Joes
pension scheme.

Also I'm not sure any big company 'completely depends' on FOSS. Yes it's an
awesome thing, but big companies would survive just fine without it.

~~~
bricestacey
> Also I'm not sure any big company 'completely depends' on FOSS. Yes it's an
> awesome thing, but big companies would survive just fine without it

The cost of non-FOSS is often a barrier to entry. I'd wager most companies
would never exist without FOSS providing the initial setup. This is an
assumption, but take DDG as an example with $20,000 in revenues. If they
licensed all their servers from Microsoft, they might easily be in the red
from that investment alone.

