DuckDuckGo FOSS Donations 2010 | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo FOSS Donations 2010

gabrielweinberg.com

93 pointsjordanmessina26 comments

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. :-)

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

I was thinking this exact same thing, and I really hope that isn't the case, as they are pretty awesome.

It's right. You expected more?

It is my impression that the operator is already in money, he's doing this for the hell of it.

It's pretty good considering that many startups are burning through VC money at this stage in their lives and the competition it is up against. Sure it could be more aggressively monetized, but if is bringing in enough to cover expenses why not focus on building a user base rather than cashing in.

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?

Absolutely.

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

http://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html

I'm reminded of the only time Twitter ever spent money on marketing (SXSW 2007)[1]. They negotiated with the festival to put flat panel screens in the hallways. They paid $11,000 for this and set up the TVs themselves.

[1] http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-process-involved-in-launchi...

I'd say most of the traffic came indirectly via press who covered the story, rather than the actual billboard itself. It's been done, and I don't think the press will cover the same story twice, so don't expect the same results DDG had.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I like Google's Summer of Code program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code . If you can get programmers writing open-source code when they're still students, a fair number of them might continue to contribute to open source over their career.

I really like Gabriel's idea too. Donations to open-source (or groups like the EFF) are great for the net.

And a few of the students even donate all the money they get from Google Summer of Code program. Atleast one of my friend did this - http://www.python.org/psf/donations/ [ #2 Shashwat Anand ]

Also, a fair number of whole projects take the organization donation and donate that to organizations like the FSF and SFLC. (they get 500$ for each student they mentor)

Chris (disclaimer: googler)

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

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.

> 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.

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

Presumably then "average Joes pension scheme" can go elsewhere to try and achieve a better return. What you're saying is that companies can't be generous because they have to satisfy the lust of the owners for more and more money.

Basically some are happy to ride on the coattails of others who more than likely see the innate Kantian imperative in aiding FOSS that has benefited them (and hence their dependents) in no small part. If no one gives anything (time/money/resources) to FOSS then it will die out.

10% of revenue may well be too much but some reflection of the saving made (if any) would seem reasonable and likely to produce future benefits.

DDG did say that after 2011 it would be 10% of income rather than revenue. I assume that's because at this point they are barely breaking even...

http://investor.realnetworks.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=8910...

"In periods where we achieve profitability, we intend to donate 5% of our net income to charitable organizations, which will reduce our net income for those periods."

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