If so, how do you choose which ones to donate to? Do you prefer regular or recurring donations? What payment methods do you like to use?
FSF - $10
- Lemmy
- My local Lemmy instance
- Lutris
- KDE
- Not sure if you want to count paying for Bitwarden
I pay a small amount monthly to each, I figure instead of paying $5-10 for Netflix or something, I’ll give it instead to these fantastic folks. Most of them are going through some major service, whether that’s Patreon, Paypal, whatever…I already have a credit card with my spending being tracked, I don’t mind if my love for the open source community becomes a documented metric.
I use monero to donate monthly to projects I use
- Grapheneos
- Molly.im
- Divest
- Tor
- Free tube
- Keypass
- Qubes!!
- Privacy guides
I use monero to pay for services i use
- Mullvad
For the projects that don’t accept monero I use Libre pay
- Briar…
Why briar of all projects doesn’t accept monero I will never know…
…
I tried to drink the Kool-Aid, I have to use the ecosystem if I want to support the ecosystem, if I want it to grow. The same reason I’m using lemmy
If you want to see options I recommend https://monerica.com/#non-profits
Qubes is so cool. The most under-rated Linux distro imo. Not my daily driver but a very cool concept.
Yes! They’re my kind of crazy.
I run it on one of my machines all the time. I’d say after about 3 weeks it’s totally usable, you get used to the quirks. Framework is such a good pairing with qubes.
Framework is such a good pairing with any Linux distro
There, fixed that for you.
It wasn’t broken. But thank you for letting people know it works on platforms other then xen.
I’m a programmer. I have created, maintained and contributed to many open source projects over 40 years. That’s my donation.
I never give money: I give my time - like for example I’m a volunteer at our local association for the blind - and I give non-commercial things like my blood, used clothing, used toys or food. And to repay the other developers whose work I enjoy everyday, I donate code that I strive to make as good as possible.
The reason I never give money is because the money - part or all - invariably ends up in someone’s pocket other than the intended recipient. When it’s legal, it’s called “overhead”. Still, legal or not, and justified or not, I’m not interested in paying for that.
Whilst I do understand that sentiment, with our project we have made as much effort as possible to make sure that nobody thinks we would ever do such a thing.
We are rather tight fisted with our donations and make sure we only spend them when absolutely necessary - none of it goes out as regular stipends for the team and all funds for expenses get sent in response to the actual bills incurred, I don’t think any of us would dream of siphoning it into our pockets.
We were even debating if we should use the “standard” funds to foot the bill for a new hosted service thing but felt this was a bit of a grey area - the service would be provided for free but footed by the donors of which only a small percentage would likely use it… We realise just how much of a privilege it is to be in receipt of the funds so we treat them with utmost reverence.
Not that I’m trying to encourage you to donate money to projects rather than time, I very much do the same as you and donate time and effort rather than money, but there are some good guys out there.
there are some good guys out there
I know that. But it’s just a general rule at this point: I just don’t give money. It’s rarely satisfying to give money (and yes, the person doing the donation needs to feel good doing it too) and I just don’t want to find out who deserves to get mine and who doesn’t. I understand your sentiment too, but that’s my personal rule. One has to draw the line somewhere: I’m not Mother Theresa and I reckon I contribute more than the average person to my local community. But I’m also free to donate what I want to donate, and money isn’t part of what I want to donate.
That is more than fair enough, as said, not trying to get you to donate or anything, especially if you already donate your time. Just hoping to put something out there that some of us really do take the donations seriously and we try to be as transparent as possible with everything, I just wish more projects would do that to shake some of the potential mistrust.
Yeah, I make a comfortable living doing software, and having kids didn’t work out. So I give out a few hundred bucks a year spread across the likes of Gnome, KDE, Mozilla, and some one off donations to smaller projects that end up saving me some time. Free software costs me more than proprietary software. Haha. (Well, unless I factor in the software I use for work… Then not even close O_o)
I get the impression that maybe the money sent to Mozilla might be a waste though. :-\
I’ve set up a recurring donation for Signal, pay for a yearly Bitwarden subscription that I don’t really need because the free tier covers my needs, so I consider it a donation, too, and throw some pocket money at some projects every new and then. oh and I have Mullvad and Tuta subscriptions.
I’ve given one time donations to many. Mostly gaming and MiSTer related. I currently donate monthly to lemmy.
I have to admit that I don’t. I have done a couple of one-off donations before but I generally hope that my karma is balanced by some of the effort I put into helping out with a couple of projects.
That said, I’ve been utterly floored as to how generous the community has been with donating to one project I help with in particular. We added a donation platform with OpenCollective early on in the project but kind of hid the link away a little in the navbar, I thought we might get a tiny bit thrown at us every so often. When Distrotube did a video on us, one of the comments he made is that we should make the Donate button much more obvious, we did and now we have a whole bunch of super generous sponsors backing the project and making it possible. We keep the spending as open as we possibly can - it mostly goes into our backend hosting costs and website stuff and really does help it all stay alive.
Love hearing from devs that donations are coming into their projects, thank you for sharing that! Contributing time and expertise is just as important thank you for your contributions 🫡🫡🫡
at the beginning of the month, I donate 5-10% of what I have in my bank account to whichever project I like to support atm. this month, a really nice symfonium update dropped and I like the direction KDE is going, so this is where my money will go to in 5 days
I love this idea (of just picking something I’m loving each month), it would help me overcome my decision paralysis about who to support.
DivestOS developer who is maintainer for Mull and Fennec as well.
Yes, a few. Signal (daily use), LetsEncrypt & Certbot (EFF). It’s not enough.
One day I decided I’d spend $x every January (when I do all my other donations) on open source stuff I depend on, and roughly in the proportions I depend on them. It quickly became impossible - I can’t just fund Debian (which I use a lot of in VMs), I’d need to think of all their dependencies, same with NGINX, Node etc etc. The mind boggles.
I need something like a Spotify subscription for open source to assuage my guilt of the great value I extract for my personal use of open source.
I need something like a Spotify subscription for open source to assuage my guilt of the great value I extract for my personal use of open source.
I would love to see something like this, where I can contribute to an open source project while also contributing to all their dependencies. Maybe such a thing exists and I just haven’t heard of it yet.
I donate regurlay to:
- OSMand
- Signal
- Bitwarden
I wish I could donate to many software projects I rely on regularly. Unfortunately I barely make a living now and being in a developing country makes donations hard to do with all the fees and regulations, as well as the difference in currency (1 dollar is 7-ish of our currency). I still feel guilty about not being able to do that. But maybe in the future I’ll be able assuage that guilt. I am learning how to code though and can already make some things. I’ll look into contributing code when I feel I can do that.
Stay strong brother
Well, I can’t help you with the fact that you don’t have a whole lot of money to begin with, but as far as the fees and regulations and currency issues, Monero would solve that.
I can’t really afford recurring donations but I’ve done one-off donations to projects I value (especially smaller ones).
GrapheneOS and Piped
