There were some posts over the holiday season asking for projects to donate to, and for those who have the means to comfortably do so, this is an important gift to consider.

If there’s only a limited amount each of us is able to give, I assume there’s no point giving it all to, for one example, The Linux Foundation, because a small personal donation is trivial next to the ~$15,000,000 USD they receive from sponsors dependent on them[1]. I understand that funding sources can be a major and profound source of bias[2] and ideally we would be, for example, helping to make Firefox independent of Google, but until we have more collective power, it’s not worth letting smaller important projects struggle instead.

So, which important projects should we leave to the sponsors, and which really need our support?

  • squirrel@discuss.tchncs.de
    46·
    26 days ago

    AntennaPod states this on their website

    AntennaPod doesn’t need a lot of money. Our (annual) costs are already covered by our existing donation funds. Therefore, we’d much prefer it if you

    • donate to your favorite podcast(er), or
    • help us with a non-monetary contribution.
      • Dimand@aussie.zone
        131·
        26 days ago

        Wikipedia is amazing, and I have donated to them a number of times. But something just rubs me the wrong way about their current donation drive and anything I read about how much their higher ups are getting paid makes no sense to me. Why are the salaries so high? Where is the clear breakdown of server cost and infrastructure?

      • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
        4·
        26 days ago

        I donate to Wikipedia monthly because this is such an important website, but their donation drive is making my blood boil each time.

  • ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.comEnglish
    368·
    27 days ago

    Maybe I can say Wikipedia because if it’s mediawiki software. Every year they ask for money but a lot of their funds don’t go towards the Wikipedia project.

  • smpl@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    14·
    26 days ago

    I’d recommend you donate money to those who host open infrastructure. That stuff is expensive and critical to the free and open internet.

    As for free software projects I suggest donating your time with contributions. That’s what they need the most. Helping with bug reports and writing documentation are easy starters and worth much more than money. That’s hard to sell as a gift though… One gift card for confirming and investigating a bug in free software of choice. Merry Christmas Uncle Bob!

    Going from being a cool hacker who does things for fun and share it with his peers to being a poor cyberbeggar does no good to a persons selfworth. Help out by contributing and let Mr. Cool Hacker have time for his day job on the side. We get better software and fewer burnouts.

    • comfy@lemmy.mlOP
      4·
      26 days ago

      I’m glad you mentioned the open infrastructure projects. For example, I use some of the few remaining nitter/invidious/etc. servers.

      As for free software projects I suggest donating your time with contributions.

      Definitely. I’m already spending much of my spare time doing this.

  • Andrei@lemmy.ml
    101·
    26 days ago

    Matrix, Deltachat, Nextcloud more then enough, they can not more even with money

    • hash@slrpnk.netEnglish
      3·
      25 days ago

      Matrix? Are we going by volume or need? Cause i’m pretty sure they could use more funding.

      • Andrei@lemmy.ml
        1·
        23 days ago

        Don’t get me wrong using the Matrix, etc. But! They constantly complain: there is no money, no money, money appears, problems are not solved as before. A simple infusion of money will not solve anything… Money for what?! There are a lot of similar projects that are conceived and managed by one person, only one, without an army of programmers, managers, managers, etc.

  • Orbituary@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2214·
    26 days ago

    Why do people ask questions like this? Isn’t, “Which worthwhile FOSS projects are underfunded?” a better way to say it?

    It’s just so kludgy.

      • Apathy@lemmy.world
        41·
        26 days ago

        What makes it a different question, I’m ignorant and ask that you explain

        • Daeraxa@lemmy.ml
          41·
          26 days ago

          Not OP but I would say because it is a smaller list where if you want to donate and make a big difference to the project then you know it is good to give money to pretty much anyone other than the over funded ones.

        • comfy@lemmy.mlOP
          2·
          26 days ago

          “Which FOSS projects have enough funding that we should donate elsewhere?” is more-or-less asking “Which FOSS projects are overfunded?”, making it almost the opposite of “Which worthwhile FOSS projects are underfunded?”

          Plenty of projects I rely on are underfunded or adequately funded, and there are many thousands of underfunded projects. So I’ll have no shortage of projects to consider. By instead asking for the overfunded projects, I can simply cross them off my list of projects to donate to.

          • Apathy@lemmy.world
            1·
            26 days ago

            Thank you, I understand

            I think orbituary was trying to point out why do we not ask and give “notice” to underfunded project rather than those that already are funded and I feel both of you are trying to convey the same sentiment.

            I could be dead wrong as well but thank you for bringing this to notice

    • Nexy@lemmy.sdf.org
      31·
      26 days ago

      Because when they ask that, people say wikipedia or firefox and not things like archive

  • logging_strict@lemmy.ml
    31·
    25 days ago

    pip-requirements-parser

    strictyaml

    pip-tools

    These are all abandoned important Python packages

    Is funding for a maintainer even an option?