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Ask HN: What projects do you donate to?

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Re: Ask HN: What projects do you donate to?

#52
post #7

I live in Ukraine. So I donate to lots of funds like United24 and Come Back Alive Foundation. I believe it helps stop the war and the aggressor. Thousands die every day...

I will just share some links:

https://u24.gov.ua/

https://savelife.in.ua/en/

https://www.razomforukraine.org/

Re: Ask HN: What projects do you donate to?

#58
My list:

Thunderbird

NVDA

Tor

EFF

And no longer:

Wikipedia - they have enough

Mozilla - they don't invest in FF

Considering:

Internet archive

Notepad++

My criteria are mainly what I use in my everyday life and derive value from it. What can bring additional positive change in the world and or can bring postive change to other people who cannot afford to donate themselves.

Re: Ask HN: What projects do you donate to?

#59
post #4

Food banks.

Yea this. I don't think I've donated to anything that wasn't either food banks or food distribution networks (the layer on top of the food banks) in like a decade+. If you don't count occasional neighbor/friend cancer-charity-run things.

There's a lot of hungry people in the US. I grew up going to elementary school with a lot of kids who didn't eat much at home (free breakfast and lunch at school), and the results aren't pretty.

Once we can reliably feed our poorest as a society, then maybe I'll donate to something else.

Re: Ask HN: What projects do you donate to?

#60
post #23

I rarely donate on the internet because it’s hard to verify the authenticity of many causes. Unless I know someone personally or the situation is something I can trust, I find it hard to commit. I feel that donations only truly carry meaning when they are directed towards something real and tangible. For me, it’s more about going to the ground and understanding the situation firsthand before making any decision.

Then just donate to the projects that you use maybe? Certainly there are some OSS projects that don't need our help (Chromium, for example), but there are lots that do:

- Emacs packages like Consult, Denote, Helm, Magit, and many others

- Anki

- Recoll

- FSF

- Virtually all community driven linux distros

If you want to make the argument that "I don't know if I can trust the maintainer to actually put my hard earn money to good use in improving the project", then I would say "just be ethical; the laborer deserves his wages".

Not so hot take: FOSS should be treated as shareware was in the 80s and 90s.

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