Ask HN: To which FOSS projects will you donate a little something? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: To which FOSS projects will you donate a little something?

I am not a rich person, but I can feed a family and I usually donate a small amount of money to the FOSS projects that make my daily coding life better. Firefox, Linux Foundation, EFF, Wikipedia, Cygwin...

To which projects do you give a little financial support?

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I used to donate to Wikipedia until I found they that have plenty of money already. I used to donate to Mozilla until I found that they don't use the money for Firefox development but for anti-free speech propaganda like [1]. I have donated to the EFF and the Internet Archive a few times. I wanted to donate to UBlock Origin but the developer doesn't want it [2]. I'd like to give something to youtube-dl because I use it extensively but apparently that's not possibly either [3]. I should consider donating to Ubuntu/Debian, I've never done that despite being a long time user.. For my work I mostly use open source software by Google and I think they'll survive without my money. Other than that I've mostly given to smaller podcasts and websites.

[1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/fellow-research-decen...

[2] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/976

[3] https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/2238

The Mozilla link is indeed distressing. Technology controls are not solutions for extremism. That is a failed approach going back to the Gutenberg press.

Counter-intuitively observing the free expression and movement of extremist groups is a way to measure the patterns of free expression. Free speech is often not nice speech.

I pick small ones over large ones like you listed, and make a not too small donation, like $50 or $100.

I feel that this can give a considerable boost to someone's motivation, while it is a small drop in the bucket for established organizations and projects. It will not "go to waste" with larger ones, but it will not feel as personal as a (typically) single maintainer getting donations -- which they do get rarely.

Go through your list of browser or mail client extensions, for example!

I donated to a couple last giving Tuesday

Arch Linux: I've been a user for 10 years and haven't given back financially.

OpenBSD: Underpins some of the most important tools in the modern FOSS world (OpenSSH, OpenSMTPD, tmux, among others), my website and mail server run on it and it's a joy to use and administer. Essentially no maintenance other than patching and it's so simple that I don't have to worry about being vulnerable.

Blender, Ink (because it's hard to google: https://github.com/inkle/ink), Libregraphicsworld

Please consider donating to the GNU project.

https://www.gnu.org/software/

If your using linux, your using GNU as well.

Tor Project, Tails and EFF. Also planning to donate to Thunderbird this year.

Firefox. Despite their mismanagement, Mozilla is the last defense against the return to an IE6 style monoculture and the death of the open web we fought so hard for in the 2000s.

Related, projects I've donated to in the past are QGIS, a great FOSS alternative to the limited and heinously overpriced ArcMap, and Homebrew, which despite it's ubiquity doesn't bring in the developer much money.

Mastodon. Someone building a JIT translator from 68000 machine code to ARM. Elementary OS.

I also chip in toward upkeep on my favorite Mastodon instance.

I used to donate to Wikipedia but stopped when I saw that they have enough already.

I still donate to ffmpeg (it's used in more software than you might think), newpipe, signal (the signal foundation, the people behind the end to end encrypted messenger) and debian.

I use all of the above software and I'm fairly happy with it.

Some projects I've donated to this year, either directly or via donating to their developers.

OpenStreetMap Wikipedia DAVx5 Jellyfin Mobian Thunderbird PureMaps Sequeler rust-gtk

https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects

Linux on M1 macs

https://www.patreon.com/marcan

Wikipedia, Firefox, Notepad++,

Qubes

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