If you had $5,000 to donate to your favourite open-source projects, which one would they be?
I would donate to (and have donated to some of) the following:
Probably 100% Mozilla.
The free and open web is so in danger right now.
I wouldn't donate to a nonprofit that pays 5 mil a year to their CEO, it sounds to me they have the money but waste it on the wrong things.
Same reason I don't donate to Wikipedia. They act like they're running on fumes but in reality they have money.
They have a very long history of mismanaging money and wasting it on worthless projects, not to mention multi-million dollar executive salaries while laying off hundreds of workers and many other controversies.
Firefox is the only reason I don't want that useless walking corpse to die for good. And I can't even support it, since it belongs to the corporation rather than the foundation.
They have a very long history of mismanaging money and wasting it on worthless projects, not to mention multi-million dollar executive salaries while laying off hundreds of workers and many other controversies.
I don't think you will find an organisation of that scale that doesn't have salaries for execs like this, You might not like it but that is an unavoidable reality, you can't run a business based of wishful thinking.
Some projects got dumped but at least they are taking risk and making new projects (which got us Rust, stack overlow survey favorite language from 2016 - 2023).
Can I donate to EFF instead?
Sure, but if Mozilla dies, Firefox dies and we're all on chromium 🤮
Mozilla might have mismanaged their money (didn't know about that), but right now it's a tangible (and the only) mainstream alternative to Google's monopoly.
1k to NixOS, (my perfect distro)
500 to NewPipe (dont know what I would do without them)
500 to Bitwarden (for hosting my passwords),
500 to XFCE (for the Wayland transition),
500 to Neovim (my text editor of choice),
500 for Aurora Store (essential for all Custom ROM users, to support them in these difficult times),
500 for the core Lemmy project,
500 for my instance's maintainers,
and last, but definitely not least:
500 for The Everything Project: A project which aims to provide a unified way to access various platforms and services including but not limited to Lemmy and other Fediverse platforms, Reddit, and more. (no, I'm not a contributor or maintainer, but if you want to be, or just want to find out more: https://github.com/everything-gripe )
Godot!
Second for godot!
uBlock Origin would be my number one, but they don't take donations. So my list would roughly contain:
I'd like to donate to Firefox as well, but Mozilla spends too much for the wrong things and AFAIK it's not possible to only support Firefox development.
uBlock Origin would be my number one, but they don't take donations.
You can always donate to the people who maintain the filter lists!
Debian and mozilla.
Mozilla needs all they can get to compete with Google or else we risk losing a free and open internet.
Gimp or libre office.
GrapheneOS
Kdenlive (my video editor, already donate them $40/yr)
Krita (image editing program I occasionally use)
Linux Lite (my first distro)
Lemmy (obvious)
uBlock origin (obvious)
Internet archive (to preserve what we had)
EFF (to fight against corporations trying to bend the laws in their favor)
Some Apps I've used from F-droid
KDE, Lemmy, Mozilla, Eclipse, and openSUSE. £1000 each.
Lemmy, Mastodon, Mozilla (Firefox), MuseScore (music notation), VLC
mastodon (& tusky) lemmy (& thunder) helix editor lapce forgejo bitwarden alacritty linux kernel ublock origin signal
That's off the top of my head. I think I might also print a bunch of stickers promoting the fediverse.
How do you donate to the linux kernel team(for a lack of a better term). kernel.org does not have any links to donation and neither does the linux foundation
no idea I don't even know if they actually need/want donations
Desktop:
Debian.
xfce.
Firefox.
Thunderbird.
mpv.
Android:
Tachiyomi.
Newpipe.
K-9 mail.
Fennec.
F-droid.
Simple app suite.
No one mentioned LibreOffice and LibreWolf . They deserve all support
1000 each to jellyfin, OBSProject, Linux Mint, Calibre, and Krita
Sponsorblock
I recently donated to immich. That project created a product that allows me to take back ownership over my photographs and no longer am I dependent on Google for my memories.
I've already done a small donation to Pihole because I'm broke. If I had 5k to donate, that money would go to them again.
Organic Maps and F-Droid
Organic maps 😍
PeerTube
I buy computers from System76; does that count?
Joplin. End-to-end-encrypted, markdown-formatted note-taking app that you can either sync using the cloud, Syncthing, or use entirely offline.
Kiwix since it allows accessing some services offline (Wikipedia, iFixit, StackOverflow) where Internet cannot be taken for granted. You can host a small Kiwix server than can be accessed as a local hotspot and browser whatever packages were downloaded into it.
Not my favourite but the most important: A proper fully integrated clinical information system. Currently all OSS are lacking behind seriously and especially the developing world but also rich countries would benefit so much from a proper system. But sadly even that amount wouldn't cut it.
This is a topic that really needs money to safe lifes and safe money for everyone.
Probably some others after more thought... but first off, to:
Trisquel GNU/Linux
LibreOffice
VLC
GIMP
Audacity
Mixxx
Xiph.org (Ogg/Theora)
Aard2
7-Zip
wget
Vim
uBlock Origin
LineageOS
Blender Studio Films (open films)
Pepper & Carrot (webcomic)
Celestia
Minetest
Lichess
0ad
Thanks for talking about pepper and carrot. It's so great to see something so good be free.
Artix Linux (my personal distro)
Graphene OS (my phone)
NeoVim (my text editor)
LibreWolf (my browser)
ublockOrigin (my God)
Honorable mention: OpenStreetMaps
Newpipe
Gimp
Loads of good choices here, i would like to add calibre and darktable.
I already donate to one of the libraries I use on GitHub sponsors, also the box86 developer and a few others. I am donating to the UVTools developer as it was cheaper than paying for the shitty proprietary software subscription for my resin printer. I've donated to pmOS in the past as well as Debian and Arch.
Joplin and Lemmy.
Joplin finally freed me from dealing with the likes of Evernote ever again.
The Tor project, Libre Office, Signal, Matrix.org, NixOS, Fedora
Sponsorblock
Revanced Manager
Infinity for reddit
F-Droid
Wikipedia
Blender
New pipe
Mastodon
Gimp
KDE
Lemmy
Minetest
Lichess
Codeberg
Thunderbird
Internet Archive
Infinity for reddit
I think you mean infinity for lemmy
A lot of the options listed in this thread are good choices - but most are big projects that get a fair amount of financial attention as it is (though very rarely enough to actually support the devs).
If I had $5k to donate to a project, I'd choose some of the really small FOSS projects that I use heavily, like AudiobookShelf
Give everything to NixOS
KiCad, FreeCAD, GIMP, Inkscape, & LibreOffice.
Qutebrowser as I use it daily, and it is by far the best browser for me.
That awesome, I’ve been meaning to check the project out again. I love the keyboard centric nature.
Emacs/Doom Emacs, Linux foundation, VLC, Latex/Tikz, KeePassXC, LibreOffice.
Have you looked at typst? It's a very promising LaTeX alternative.
Archlinux + EndeavourOS
Lemmy Devs + Instance admin
Gnome
Voyager
Wine
Mangohud
Ublock origin
Pipewire
Syncthing. With godot as a close second.
Half to debian, half to i3wm.
For me, I would definitely put the money into the open medical science stuff going on, like projects that are working towards open source insulin production and pumps and stuff. A close relative is diabetic (T1), and the things he buys just to stay alive are not cheap, and I would want that to change. The work those people are doing is extremely important, since insulin production is currently a very complex process and it takes significant time. Large Pharma companies have labs dedicated to doing it and they've streamlined the more traditional ways of doing it, which, due to the complexity, those methods have a very high (financial) barrier to entry, which keeps other, more generic labs from producing the substance needed for diabetics to live.
I'm talking about liquid insulin.
The FOSS push on this is focused on making a simpler method of production, and delivery of the insulin, giving third party and generic drug manufacturers an alternative to the high-cost of setting up a manufacturing line for insulin, and hopefully driving costs down.
They're also working on delivery systems, aka insulin pumps, that are FOSS. The problem there will be regulatory approval; the medical community is fairly strict when it comes to this stuff.... In any case, as nice as many things mentioned here are, I always feel that those guys always need help.
Openinsulin is one of those donations that I never cancel the reoccurring payments too. It's a huge problem in the US but also places all around the world that even universal healthcare just here in the states wouldn't solve, but pushing for open development and lowering costs makes it easier for people not in wealth to get.
FreeCAD
Definitely AnkiDroid for me
Definitely this order:
Freecad definitely needs the money.
Barrier KDE NeoVim
Easily the surface-linux kernel project, that level of dedication is incredible and without I wouldn't have my favorite laptop running linux right now.
And probably all of KDE's various developers if possible, since I both love the actual desktop environment and all the various tools they provide (like Elisa, Kdenlive, and KDE Connect).
Definitely Blender
I'd also donate to ReactOS. Nobody uses that (me included) but I see a lot of effort, I'd donate to them
Waterfox, CalyxOS, Signal, the JPEG-XL team, GNOME
Just FYI, Signal (Open Whisper Systems) is not FOSS-friendly. The server-side software is not open source, they refuse to federate with other Signal implementations, and they are unfriendly to forks. See:
I recommend using Molly instead if you need to communicate with Signal users. Note, the Molly-FOSS flavor excludes proprietary Google libraries entirely.
If you are interested in trying an alternative that is unrelated to Signal, I suggest looking at SimpleX Chat.
GrapheneOS. But hard to say because anything that gives us a choice besides either Apple or Google or Facebook, etc, we desperately need.
FreeBSD