Become an Official Software Freedom Conservancy Supporter | Hacker News Reader

Become an Official Software Freedom Conservancy Supporter

sfconservancy.org

65 pointsjcn22 comments

"Conservancy assists FLOSS project leaders by handling all matters other than software development and documentation, so the developers can focus on what they do best: improving the software for the public good."

All of their projects: http://sfconservancy.org/members/current/

I would donate but only if 100% of the money goes toward the projects and not social causes such as teaching x/y/z to code or an outreach program for demographic a/b/c (looking at Gnome Foundation and Mozilla here).

That's your prerogative, but doesn't more exposure mean more potential future contributors?

You say this like it's unconditionally a good thing. Consider a lot of the pain with Gnome, systemd, pulseaudio, etc.

More cooks isn't always a good thing.

I don't think that pain is caused by "more cooks", but rather by the dominance of Red Hat.

Not sure about their financials, but they're pretty transparent overall. Some of their internal policies (linked from that support page) are in their git repo https://gitorious.org/conservancy/policies and their list of services seems pretty clear: http://sfconservancy.org/members/services/

Their tax filings are at http://sfconservancy.org/about/filings/ and a couple explanatory posts http://sfconservancy.org/blog/?tag=filings

One of the organization's staff (but not as an official activity, afaik) has a repository of filings of many free/open type organizations, https://gitorious.org/floss-foundations/npo-public-filings/ which is useful for comparison purposes, and welcomes contributions of info (most of it is available elsewhere on the web, but can be hard to find). Perhaps ought to be a website.

If you want to donate to a project (e.g. twisted, wine, whatever), 90% goes to the project and 10% goes to the SFC. The 10% is mostly covering operational costs as the SFC is incredibly helpful.

We (PyPy) are working with them for quite a bit and we spend the 90% either earmarked for the specific proposals or on sprint accomodation/travel/etc. if you don't wish to specify the proposal.

I was already considering donating a meaningful amount, but now I will donate double to compensate for the effect your absurd statement might had on HN readers.

Every time I see comments like this I can't help but imagine that we've all become the victims of some elaborate cointelpro scheme.

I've donated... Conservancy does good for a lot of great projects. Heck, if you're using / developing FOSS, you're pretty much 100% guaranteed to be helped by the work Conservancy is doing.

I wrote here about why I'm supporting, and why you should too:

  http://dustycloud.org/blog/donate-to-conservancy/

It really pains me to be critical of what is a good thing, but I do wish that they would hire a designer for their website.

There seems to be a rejection of design in OSS (less so these days, I admit). I really like the idea of judging software solely on how it stands alone, but people don't do that, and to many this will just come across as amateur.

Yes. Also, their available payment options seem a little behind the times.

What option are you missing? Bitcoin?

I think you'll find that it's very difficult to set up other payment options with 100% Free Software. If Conservancy were willing to use proprietary software on our website for payment options, we could probably implement others somewhat easily.

PayPal is annoying, but at least it integrates easily and doesn't require you to install proprietary Javascript or the like on your own website (like stripe.com does).

Bitcoin is possible to do with 100% Free Software, but it's very difficult to set up.

I think most people don't realize how much work goes into these things. Most non-profit organizations have a huge staff that can set up things like this. Conservancy doesn't.

Bradley Kuhn? :)

    $ sudo apt-get install bitcoind
    $ mkdir ~/.bitcoin
    $  echo rpcpassword=password! > ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf
    $ chmod 600 ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf
    $ bitcoind -testnet &
    $ bitcoind -testnet getnewaddress SomeStringCalledAccount

Note the -testnet bit. I don't actually have any idea how bitcoin works. The commands above created a lot of binary files under ~/.bitcoin/testnet3 and spit out a magic-looking string: mr2c2XZwe55xYPqVUkQ8sroi6X674UXJmb ... which I think people could use right now to send me test money on the test net.

Anyone: Does my bitcoind even need to be running for them to do that?

I don't see in there all the accounting configurations you'd need to integrate that with Conservancy's accounting system, nor all the legal research to figure out how it impacts Conservancy's Form 990 filings, nor all the workflow code to make sure transactions are auto-imported, identified with people who want to be identified, so they can be sent their t-shirts.

Too often, people think "it's easy for me to set something up for myself to use, it must be just as easy for a non-profit it do it". It just isn't.

And yes, I'm Bradley Kuhn.

I understand that during your interaction with fans of the free software movement, you must receive significantly more "free advice" than free work or donations. I apologize on behalf of my personality type! :)

Naive question: could one of your core members accept bitcoin on behalf of the Conservancy and manually convert the balance into a paper check or wire transfer periodically?

I expect that the very public nature of bitcoin transactions would discourage embezzlement. A little script added to https://gitorious.org/conservancy/website could display the transaction log.

"Sorry, t-shirts and recognition aren't available for bitcoin donations at this time."

shrug That's how I'd do it. </free advice> :)

I'm afraid they cannot hire a designer, but maybe they could accept a few pull requests? (Unfortunately, I failed to find their site on githib, but probably they have a repo somewhere.)

https://gitorious.org/conservancy/website

Indeed, we seem willing in free software to accept the "step up and code", but not enough with the "step up and design". Help a nonprofit out! I'm sure they'd love some design help.

Conservancy has three employees. I'm the only one who knows anything about CSS and web design. I know almost nothing about it: most of what I learned was net.searching to set up Conservancy's website and https://copyleft.org/ .

As said elsewhere in the thread, submit any UX merge request you like, I'd be glad to accept it!

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