FOSS donations which reach the roots

FOSS donations which reach the roots
github.com

I wonder how we could actually "reach" the roots of FOSS with funding. For example, the whole Faker.js thing copied their data definitions from the similarly named Ruby project, which copied them from the even earlier PHP project. How much funding do those earlier projects deserve? Which percentage do any of the ~257 contributors to Faker.js deserve? Somehow Marak does not strike me as an overly generous person.

Personally, I treat any contributions I make to FOSS more as a hobby. There are some PRs I've made in the past that fix a decent chunk of technical debt or introduce fancy new algorithms to speed up parts of the software. Those PRs were submitted without an invoice, even though I do similar work as a freelancer. If I knew the maintainers were getting significant amounts of money for their work, it would definitely not be the same feeling contributing significant chunks of work for free.

Fifty people donate $20 each, to be divided between 100 recipients, that's 150 transactions (50x$20, 100x$10). As long an the donations are earmarked for more than 3 recipients per donor, that works out as fewer transfers.

Apple Music in theory could have paid artists more, but I haven't heard any news on that front since ages ago, when Weird Al puzzled out loud about how he was making about 1/10th of what he used to make.

And I thought Brave's original model was something along this line and they seem to have abandoned it, which is probably worth digging into.

I think you have to consider as well that if and when someone actually figures out how to make this distribution model work, Visa will notice and introduce their own system. They can split the difference on overhead and increase their margins while also increasing donation efficiency. But perhaps only once someone else has proven the idea (free R&D).

If I as a C suite decide to donate to the NRA, I may discover an angry mob outside my office who inform me that the majority of the company is anti-NRA, or planned parenthood, or Susan G Koman or or or.

If I earmark a half a million for matching, then my employees 'vote' on where that money goes, and it's not my 'fault' that employee A hates employee B's decisions. "We" didn't decide anything. Our employees did.

You could however do the same thing without the matching part and just allocate $200 per employee that they can allocate how they want. If I think jquery deserves $5 and five coworkers all think that should be $10, then a check for $55 goes to jquery.org. Or perhaps the cutoff is $100 (because some administrator has to write all these checks), and either they get nothing or I find more people who like jquery.

I think where we can help this sort of process is by pointing out how much money we are saving by using these tools, and try to convince our employers to allocate a couple % of that to donations, regardless of whether they get a tax break due to the group being a 501c3.

We just switched a number of services off of Oracle. I know some of them went to postgres but probably not all. I bet postgres, mysql, redis, elasticsearch haven't seen one thin dime of that money.