
Our 2016 Open Source Donations - wicket
https://duck.co/blog/post/303/2016-foss-donations-announcement
======
MichaelBurge
Donating to open-source seems like such a good use of charity money. I never
give to charity because it always seems so abstract, or there might be better
ways to solve the problem; with open source people are usually laboring over
it with no recognition, and even a little seems like it has such high marginal
benefit.

I'm in-between jobs right now(occupied with a side project), but at some point
I'd really like to fund feature development on some open source projects:

* GNUCash has a solid heart, but has some usability issues that make it a pain to use in practice.

* Freenet last I checked had only 1 fulltime developer. And he's probably taking a serious cut to market salary to work on it.

* GHC could stand to have some performance optimization done on the compiler.

* Inkscape or GIMP are handy to have around. Inkscape even has a page describing how you can host a fundraiser for targeted feature development, which is very rare for open-source.

* I don't know that TOR needs much software help, but I wouldn't mind funding some exit nodes. It'd be nice if you could buy a locked-down black-box exit node that you could plug into your wall or something, that was guaranteed not to incriminate you. Maybe outside the scope of this, though.

* Everyone has a little app or site they use where a few people are working without much benefit to maintain something you use all the time.

Is there a good list of needy open-source software?

~~~
tyrust
> I never give to charity because it always seems so abstract, or there might
> be better ways to solve the problem

It can be difficult to know whether or not you are making an impact with a
donation. Fortunately there are sites like Charity Navigator [0] that audit
aggregate and audit charities to make things easier. Some sites (like Giving
What We Can [1] and GiveWell [2]) make it even simpler by suggesting a few
charities that they deem most effective.

For example, one of these top charities is the Against Malaria Foundation [3].
They're a fairly straightforward charity: they receive and review requests for
mosquito nets and fulfill orders with donations. When you donate they tell you
exactly how many nets were bought with your donation and where they were sent.
In this way your dollars (approximately) directly help prevent the spread of
malaria. Now, could this problem be better solved with donations to a malaria
vaccine research group? Perhaps. For the time being, mitigating the issue with
nets seems like a decent interim solution.

My point is that there are many, many charities out there doing great work.
It's worth looking into.

(Another note: I don't mean to imply that you _shouldn 't_ give to open source
projects. I am just trying to say that you could _also_ consider giving to
traditional charities.)

[0] - [http://www.charitynavigator.org/](http://www.charitynavigator.org/)

[1] - [https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/top-
charities/](https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/top-charities/)

[2] - [http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-
charities](http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities)

[3] - [https://www.againstmalaria.com/](https://www.againstmalaria.com/)

~~~
tomjen3
My problem with that is that they mitigate the issue, they don't end it. As
great as against malaria is, there will always be another family that needs
nets, no matter how much you donate it will never be enough. One a feature has
been added to an open source software, it is available to all those who need
it.

~~~
rfrey
I get your point but that comes across as very callous to me, valuing a
feature in software that benefits a small fraction of the most prosperous
people in already-prosperous countries over the health of a family.

Consider reframing it: With a small donation you solve the problem for a
family (where the problem is the risk that their children will die!), and you
can solve it over and over just by repeating the action - it's the definition
of scalability. You won't have to keep adding different colors of net to make
that family safe.

But there's always another software feature to be added, the job is never done
- and when you add a feature it's only for the one package! If you want to do
it again you have to start from scratch.

Also, when you consider improvements in your projects, you no doubt consider
both cost and impact. Compare the impact of the feature-add your donation
might make in an open-source project, to the impact saving one or more
family's lives.

------
frik
The donations are great for open source projects.

I just wonder if DDG is investing in their own crawler? With Yahoo BOSSS API
bite the dust therefor loosing access to Bing search result. DDG nowadays has
to rely on Yandex (Russian search engine) for their search result. The search
results of DDG have gone from okay to a bit worse, so what's their long term
strategy? Stay a meta-search-engine, or invest major resources to crawl the
web themselves? What many people hate is high latency and to lower latency you
cannot rely on third party APIs for the main search.

~~~
Sephr
There is an official Bing API coming out soon (a Bing developer recently
mentioned this in an HN thread a couple days ago, although I can't find it
atm), so they won't have to rely on Yandex for much longer. I have no idea if
the pricing will be comparable to Yahoo BOSS though.

------
levemi
I'm surprised DDG can donate so much money to open source. They must be doing
well? Or is this money they've helped raise from their users? $225,000! That's
a lot of money.

~~~
jkldotio
DDG has done excellent work building their traffic[0] and have been getting a
solid 10-12 million or so searches per day for a while. Even if you halve that
due to !bang redirects and ad blocking and put a fairly low CPM on the ads
they have quite a few millions or or low tens of millions coming in. I haven't
been following too closely but my impression is Gabriel has been increasing
staffing and other costs at a rate far lower than the increasing revenue.

Additionally the donation itself got a vast amount of coverage in the relevant
communities, including HN, so the expenditure is offset against advertising
for user acquisition they didn't need to do. It probably also strengthened
their core community, making their users more sticky. The donation also went
to some of the infrastructure they use anyway.

[0][https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html](https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html)

~~~
doomslay
Not to pour water on things, but after 8 years or so I'm not sure it's growing
_that_ well...

After 6 years, Google was doing 200m searches a day.

Google now does something like 4 billion a day. So duckduckgo, after 8 years
of growth, has captured about 0.3% of the search market. At that sort of rate,
it'll take decades to get any meaningful share, and that's assuming Google
stand still, which they won't.

~~~
ownagefool
That's assuming you have to own the market. You don't, you just need more
income than outcome. It would appear DDG is achieving that. Good for them I
say.

------
LeoPanthera
I'm surprised to learn that Freenet is still a thing. What do people use it
for?

~~~
doublec
Decentralized microblogging using Sone, the twitter-like system on Freenet.
Freemail, the encrypted email system. FMS, the forums. I also use the
distributed data store for storing data. Basically anything you'd use IPFS for
but more anonymity.

Here's an example of using it for the backing store for my blog:
[https://bluishcoder.co.nz/2015/09/14/using-freenet-for-
stati...](https://bluishcoder.co.nz/2015/09/14/using-freenet-for-static-
websites.html)

Here's a series of articles on writing dynamic apps for Freenet - in this case
chat-like things [http://www.draketo.de/light/english/freenet/communication-
pr...](http://www.draketo.de/light/english/freenet/communication-
primitives-1-files-and-sites)

------
kriro
It seems like a pretty great list at first glance. Lots of free speech and/or
crypto related projects. Good job DDG, once again doing it right. I hope this
generates some good PR for you :)

[Now hurry and make DDG better for non-English languages, I want to use it for
everything and more importantly want to make it the default for my parents,
friends etc...well I guess strategically it doesn't make much sense if the
target niche is developers but one can hope :D]

~~~
tagawa
Message received and understood! Although we're currently trying to improve
Instant Answers for developers, we're also continuing to work on better search
results for mainstream users as awareness of privacy issues increases.

------
analognoise
I wish somebody would just give KiCad a few million dollars and we could be
free of OrCad/Altium/Etc

~~~
robert_foss
I couldn't agree more.

~~~
analognoise
The trouble is KiCad just won't cut it for complex boards. Eventually it could
get there, but I ended up buying Pulsonix. Maybe starting a nonprofit to throw
KiCad fundraisers?

------
aavotins
Very nice. More companies should come up with posts like this to a) spread
awareness b) encourage more people to work on open source projects(when
there's money on the table). That would also clear up the question of how open
source software can be sustainable and where do funds come from.

------
Lxr
Wow, DDG has come a long way since I was last there a few years ago. It's
great to have a serious player in the search space dedicated to privacy. After
spending some time using it just now their ranking algorithm still feels
somewhat inferior to Google though. This is not surprising given the resources
Google devotes to machine learning and the like I guess. Does anyone know
roughly how DDG arrive at their results?

On topic, I think their donation is a great move.

~~~
tagawa
We use several sources[1], in particular Yahoo, Bing and Yandex, and then try
to improve relevancy in the results as much as possible.

[1]
[https://duck.co/help/results/sources](https://duck.co/help/results/sources)

------
giulivo
Now... this is certainly great, especially given the particular selection of
projects receiving the donations. I've upvoted the article and hopefully more
companies (aka open source consumers) will do the same.

But then I wonder, what is that the community would benefit most from? Money
or actual code contributions?

I develop open source software and I get paid for doing it, which is a great
luxury. Go DDG, raise the bar even further, employ people working on these
projects if you don't have any already and even release more software!

------
lowglow
I'd love to bring really important open source projects to baqqer and support
them with monthly pledges. I'd like them to be transparent and open with their
direction and progress, while simultaneously letting the community there help
guide and support their efforts. Does anyone know any great open source
projects that would be open to this?

~~~
hobofan
What benefits does baqqer provide over Patreon (for single Makers) and
Bountysource Salt (for OSS projects)?

How much does baqqer charge on the donations that a maker gets through it? I
can see very little to no information without signing up.

~~~
lowglow
We help people, products, companies also grow through our community and
forums. You can also perform micro-campaigns to raise smaller amounts of money
for one-off required items. IMHO the experience is wholly different, because I
wanted the crowdfunding experience to be much more intimate and supportive.

Right now we charge 7% but only because we're trying to reach our server costs
quickly since we're bootstrapped. Once we're at a break-even point we'll be
dropping it down to 5% and remain competitive.

Most information is (probably erroneously) here:
[https://baqqer.com/tos](https://baqqer.com/tos)

------
agentgt
I know duck is all about the trust but couldn't they have picked some non
encryption/security OSS projects. It sort of reminds of the brief period where
all these sustainability/eco startups where picked for awards or help.

~~~
tagawa
We did have some non-encryption/security nominations from the community, but
we decided in advance that this year's theme would be "raising the standard of
trust online", hence this final list of recipients.

------
homero
Where are they getting money

~~~
ickwabe
[https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-
affiliates](https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates)

------
j0e1
Respect!

