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Ask HN: How to donate $1k to open source?

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Re: Ask HN: How to donate $1k to open source?

#21

Post by samspenc »

I would like to slightly disagree with some of the posts here that say $1000 may be too small or not have much of an impact...

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.

Re: Ask HN: How to donate $1k to open source?

#22

Post by einpoklum »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #9
scrollaway wrote: post #7

If you were to donate $1000 to "open source", not much would actually get anywhere useful IMO. 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 i…

As a company, I typically find donating to a company/foss/whatever that "advertises" their donors is the best way to give them money, and it be an advertising expense.

So, you want to get advertising with money that you write off for tax purposes. In many world states that would constitute tax fraud. And have the reputation of those FOSS developers benefit you, to boot. I'm sorry, that's a bit much from a small mind such as mine.

Re: Ask HN: How to donate $1k to open source?

#24

Post by jrockway »

einpoklum wrote: post #22
jermaustin1 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a company, I typically find donating to a company/foss/whatever that "advertises" their donors is the best way to give them money, and it be an advertising expense.

So, you want to get advertising with money that you write off for tax purposes. In many world states that would constitute tax fraud. And have the reputation of those FOSS developers benefit you, to boot. I'm sorry, that's a bit much from a small mind such as mine.

In the US, pretty much any expense that a business makes as part of running a business is deductible. You do not have to donate to a 501(c)(3) to get a tax break.

Re: Ask HN: How to donate $1k to open source?

#25

Post by jrockway »

I think you need to be more specific about what your goals are. Is there a particular project that you make heavy use of? Is there a particular area of projects that you care about? Is there a particular ideology that you care about?

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.)

Re: Ask HN: How to donate $1k to open source?

#26

Post by rodrigods »

Just a suggestion: you could donate "time", which probably could be valued much more than $1k:

- 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

Re: Ask HN: How to donate $1k to open source?

#27

Post by valgor »

I'm not sure if your scenario is completely hypothetical and you are limited to $1000, but if you are a company and not an individual, why not hire someone with the intention that he or she will work heavily on OSS that you require in your organization?

Re: Ask HN: How to donate $1k to open source?

#28

Post by tunesmith »

How about a maven plugin that searches for libs in your pom that registered in a db (put together by a service), and creates a mutual-fund sort of thing that you can donate to, to be distributed later? When I was in an investment club the portfolio of stocks we bought was something any of us could collectively buy into, for any amount.

Then more plugins could be written for gradle, npm, etc.

Re: Ask HN: How to donate $1k to open source?

#29

Post by jonas_kgomo »

jrockway wrote: post #25

I think you need to be more specific about what your goals are. Is there a particular project that you make heavy use of? Is there a particular area of projects that you care about? Is there a particular ideology that you care about? 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 fix…

would you welcome a platform that specifically open bounties on issues?

Re: Ask HN: How to donate $1k to open source?

#30

Post by myself248 »

einpoklum wrote: post #14
jermaustin1 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a company, I typically find donating to a company/foss/whatever that "advertises" their donors is the best way to give them money, and it be an advertising expense.

"Best" for your company's business interests? :-(

I took it as "best" in "most likely to actually reach a person who can write a check" in the corporate bureaucracy.

In most of the companies I'm familiar with, it's very hard for engineers and their managers to spend money on things that don't have a tangible return, particularly something you can stick an inventory tag on.

Marketing departments, on the other hand, are purpose-built to spend money on intangible things.

I've coached a high-school robotics program that's mostly funded out of the company's marketing budget, which they justify because the students put logos on their machines. Everyone knows we're doing it because we think it's awesome, but we have to call it marketing to slip it past the beancounters.

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