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Comment by unreal37 | Hacker News Reader

There does seem to be a need for an "Internet fund". Pick 100 of the core free technologies that everyone relies on and pay people to maintain them.

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I'm really dismayed that the Core Infrastructure Initiative, which was created in the aftermath of Heartbleed to fund OpenSSL and other critical software, has chosen to prioritize NTP, and not GnuPG[1]. Most of the companies that rely on OpenSSL are probably using a distro that uses GPG to securely distribute the OpenSSL package.

[1] http://www.linuxfoundation.org/programs/core-infrastructure-...

NTP is important as well. If I remember correctly, that decision was made around the time that NTPD was found to have multiple exploits allowing amplification attacks. Given that there are so many publicly available NTP servers, that makes it a pretty important project.

The fact is that all of these projects need better funding. Frankly it surprises me that large multinational corporations that care about security don't just fund these people. The downside risk for them is terrible.

Visibility, those who scream loudest win, people were screaming about NTP (long before heartbleed as it happens).

I agree more would be better, but aren't there several now, such as the Free Software Foundation, the Software Freedom Conservancy, and the Apache Software Foundation?

Apache Software Foundation does not pay any software developers -- so its a very different model than what you are proposing.

If people like this are still falling through the cracks, clearly there aren't enough.

The problem with such organizations is their donations only go to affiliated projects. Mozilla donates to mozilla projecs, apache donates to apache projects, fsf donates to fsf projects and so on.

Relying donations from occasional news cannot be healthy for the project. I imagine that during the next week the project will be able to amass a significant amount of donations but whenever this article is forgotten, the cash inflow will trickle.

I kinda wish that such organizations could make patreon accounts. Or maybe a non-profit service with the same idea. The point is, it's hard to keep track of all the projects that need money and to manage such donations without blowing your budget.

I can think of a few projects that I rely on a daily basis: firefox, xfce, fsf, freedesktop, python, debian, openbsd, transmission torrent, the gnome foundation, vlc, and there is probably a lot more that I can't remember right now.

I was thinking the same thing. It would be nice if there was some donations hub for open source projects with some sort of mixed Patreon/Humble-Bundle mechanic were you could donate N bucks to X open source software projects, one time or in a monthly basis.

The difficulties I see with this approach is 1) getting a trustworthy intermediate and 2) how to select the projects to allow the donations for. But 2) shouldn't be that hard because the users could, in the end, pick who they want to donate to.

... maybe the problem is people working for free and giving software away for free? The open source culture is a vehicle for entrepreneurs and investors to profit from others' work without compensation. It's that simple.

Hoping for donations to reasonably compensate developers is beyond naive.

Back when, there were one time acts of funding such as the red hat and va linux ipos that gave shares to authors of the software they were distributing.

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