Ask HN: Do you donate money to open source?

60 points by reginold ↗ HN
I'm curious about this for myself and wondered what others here do.

83 comments

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"Donate", no. But I do put around $1k/mo into open source sponsorships for advertising purposes.
how's that working out
I've only been doing it for a couple months. Still need some time before people hopefully convert from the free tier. Good traffic but ROI is not great yet. But with SaaS, a few good conversions can pay for everything pretty quickly so I'm going to stick it out for a bit.
There's a saying in advertising that someone has to see a thing 8 times from different sources before they buy it. I don't know how scientifically accurate it is, but it reflects my behavior.
I donate monthly to the blender foundation. I’m not really using the software anymore but just love what they enable for the creative community.
Not FOSS directly but let’s encrypt.
I donate time. If you were to value that time I guess it would be quite a lot of money.
Wikimedia foundation. Does that count ?
I've been an FSF member for years, if that counts.
I don't donate at all. However, I'm just answering to question whether you're going to get a representative distribution of answers from both categories.
Same here. I do contribute code or bug reports once in a blue moon though.
I have regular small donations set up to some devs that also host their projects.
I donate regularly using github sponsor and occasionally directly to projects I use.
A few hundred bucks every month from my personal funds to some specific projects via GitHub sponsorships + some patreons. Been doing this for a while and plan to continue.
I did several times.

To Mozilla, because I am happy Firefox user and want it to stay competitive.

To Whisper system, because I love Signal and want everyone to use it.

To Wikimedia, because I use Wikipedia everyday.

Yep, I donate a little bit to the GrapheneOS project. It's nothing given how much I benefit from it and how much money I save versus being in the Apple ecosystem like I used to be.
I donate via patreon to some devs making opensource (very niche projects)
Donating about $5/month to free software projects on Patreon
I’ve donated to the FreeBSD Foundation a couple of times.

https://freebsdfoundation.org/donate/

There used to be a way to give to the FreeBSD Foundation when you bought something on Humble Bundle too, but I haven’t bought anything via Humble Bundle for a good while and last time I tried to give money to FreeBSD Foundation that way I couldn’t figure out how to do it again.

I also used the fundraiser feature on Facebook one time on my birthday and posted that for my birthday I wished that people help give money to the FreeBSD Foundation, because FreeBSD means a lot to me. I also described FreeBSD a bit in the post and why I wanted to do this fundraiser. So a couple of friends and family members contributed to this fundraiser of mine. It was a very small scale thing, but it was nice to do this and I appreciated that those friends and family members helped me donate a bit of money for a project that I find important.

Donate monthly ($10) to FSF.
Donating ~$15 on GitHub and some others platforms. I have a good income, and using OSS on everyday basis, so why not :)
I'll pay for shareware or donate to freeware authors but that's about it. I think the only open source software I use regularly is Chrome and I pay for that with my soul.
No not at all. However most of the companies I worked at donated or were heavily involved in open source.
I do! I'm sponsoring this effort to catch linux trackpad software up to mac standards. Not affiliated with them in any other way, was simply blown away by a friends magic pad, right about the same time this project started. https://github.com/gitclear/libinput

edit: I also like to buy merch from OSS affiliated companies. e.g. mozilla hoodie, Neo4j shirt etc.

Hell yes to this trackpad work! How did you pick that dev specifically?

I also came across another dev on this: https://github.com/JoseExposito

They were pretty active here on hacker news tbh. They got a lot of people pretty excited.
I've donated to freecad, eff and mozilla.
Donated to Signal and I intend to donate again to other projects as soon as I can. Unfortunately I'm not working so it's not that easy, but I'm doing my part to report bugs for every software I use, even using beta versions.