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Comment by jcn | Hacker News Reader

"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/

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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/

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.

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