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Ask HN: How to fund the correct open-source organizations?
3 points by tajen on July 2, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments
It's the time of the year where I do my 1% donations to open-source. I guess I should donate to the software of my stack: Debian, Postgres, Nginx, Ansible, Dropwizard...

How do you find the "right" organizations to fund?

- I'm worried about donating to the "wrong" people of a project. The typical example would be the difference between uBlock and uBlock Origin (they're not open-source but it's an example). Are there any similar schisms in open-source projects, where the programmers have basically split away from the people who maintain the ".org" website?

- Should I donate to country-level organizations (example: Debian France, who only organize Debian conferences in France) or to the american organization?

- How to avoid another OpenSSL fiasco, by donating to the right people? Should I just give it all to the FSF, and they take care of trickling the money? Is there an org in charge of spreading the money to the right people?

Thank you, I hope you've all met those interrogations about donating.



There is no onesize solution. If you fund the fsf then little capital flows to bsd and vice versa. Some divides can't be papered over and one person's worthy cause is another's anathema. I dislike Theo de Raadts public image enough to find funding openbsd distasteful and linus' statements have the same problem but both undeniably do more good than bad and deserve funding. Even stallman deserves funding.

I think more orgs need Patreon and like giving channels but I worry the channel nickel and dime waters down the give. I used btc to pay a bsd charity and it was hugely painful so don't believe the hype of frictionless payment in crypto either.


>The typical example would be the difference between uBlock and uBlock Origin (they're not open-source but it's an example).

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock




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