Option 1: Pick my favorite project and send them 1000$ -> simple but only one project benefits from my donation Option 1: Find projects or libs I am using and accept donations, use their donation systems, distribute the 1000$ -> very time consuming and cumbersome, I have to use different systems, but can support multiple projects. Unfortunately, the donation for one project will be quite small as it is just a fraction of the donation of 1000$.
Do you know any platforms or good solutions to distribute the 1000$ or support Open Source so that the 1000$ is used as effectively as possible?
I think of it this way, no matter what you give, it's a great start. While I have open-sourced some of my apps and libraries, none of them got popular (except for one CakePHP plugin that had all of 64 stars and as many forks on GitHub way back in the day). But I think I would be excited with whatever folks donated, it's a shot in the arm, and more than the money, a validation that something I did contributed positively to society and was useful to someone else.
Secondly, if 1000 people thought like you did and donated $1000 each ... that's $1 million there, enough to hire 5-10 folks to work full-time on that project. And if all the big cos (I'm looking at you, FAANG) could donate five or six figure dollar amounts to all the open source projects they use (a rounding error in their annual revenue / incomes), open source might actually be a sustainable model, and a win-win for everybody.
Demo GIF: https://github.com/feross/thanks/blob/master/img/example.gif
GitHub repo: https://github.com/feross/thanks
P.S. I am accepting donations here: https://feross.org/thanks/
https://github.com/sponsors https://opencollective.com https://www.patreon.com
It is noble to want to help 100 projects, but with limited funds, it would go further on only a couple projects. Think, new laptop, a few months of their CI/CD service, etc.
I would recommend to avoid services, which "redistribute" donations. Such companies need to keep a part of money for themselves as running costs, and it is often not clear, if they keep 1% or 90%. And the way they decide who gets what, also might not be clear. I am not saying they are corrupted. I am just saying the transparency is lost with each "man in the middle".
[1] https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...
[2] https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Free_Software_Directory:About
...or ... <shameless plug>You're always welcome to give it to us: https://fosdem.org/2020/support/donate/ :-) </shameless plug>
FOSDEM is a huge yearly free and open source developer conference since 20 years. Have a look through our video archives to get an idea of what you'd be supporting.
P.S. Our overhead is basicly zero because we're all volunteers.
Edit: s/meta/umbrella/
Donate to them here:
In terms of impact, paying for $1000 worth of consulting on an open source project that you use is probably where it's at. "I really want bug #1234 fixed." Pay someone $1000 and it's fixed. (For a bug that takes a day or so to fix, that is.)
On top of this, as a company, donating is… complicated. If you can do it, great, but it's often easier to find a project that has a support contract and pay for that. It gives you a real and justified expense and is in general more stable income for the devs.
Furthermore, a renewable contract gives the project predictable income, which is instrinsically worth more to the project.
If you have $1k and just want to give it away once, and want it to end up in open source, I think what's best is you pick your personal favourite project and double check they both need and can take the money (then move down the list if they don't). But if you can afford to give a recurring donation, go that route instead! Patreon is a good avenue for smaller projects that don't necessarily offer contracts of their own, but at that point there's a lot of money that goes into their fee.
Edit: Another potential avenue is donating directly to a developer for their open source work (Github Sponsors will let you do that), assuming there's a dev you like a lot for that.
Decide what fraction you want to give each of several projects (or make it uniform-probability), and partition the range [0,1] by those fractions. Now draw a random number between 0 and 1 (you can do this online if you like); give the $1000 to the project in whose range you've drawn.
I'm not saying that's such a great idea, but the expected donation to each project remains the same (well, depends on some ontological considerations I suppose).
My suggestions for now would be BountySource (great for micro-financing on issues) and GitCoin (great for crypto-payments)
The two I've donated to are
Software in the Public Interest ( https://www.spi-inc.org/ )
The Software Conservancy ( https://sfconservancy.org/ )
Then more plugins could be written for gradle, npm, etc.
Core contributors to an OSS project can decide on percentage share allocation and create a credit card checkout that is accessible via a shield button. The donations/proceeds would be split on a per payment basis.
At the moment the application only handles those with a US-based account.
>Do you know any platforms or good solutions to distribute the 1000$
Well every project will get a part of it regardless of how you do it :D
>very time consuming and cumbersome
If you really care and want to donate this should not stop you.
Apart from individual/company liked projects and you can consider foundations like apache, mozilla which have contributed a lot to the community..
I almost got my employer to donate to them and have a staff member give us a presentation. That fell apart, but it's a thing that can happen.
- Contributing back the changes you've made (if any)
- Improving official documentation
- Writing blog posts on how you used the project
- Taking some time to fix upstream open bugs
