On 2025-09-02 13:07, P.B. wrote:
Thanks for the links!
I wasn't too lazy to web-search, but especially these days I believe
it's still better to ask /people who know and care/ to get reliable
information.
Sorry if it came across as an accusation of laziness! I just felt that
it would be a reasonable starting point, even if the exercise of
searching for anything these days can be frustrating. For me, it
actually provided some reminders of where I had seen the site mentioned
originally, which was a pleasant surprise.
Thank you very much for your opinion and insights.
Hm. Seems harder than imagined "where to point people to" when it comes
to financially support FOSS in general (instead of hand-selecting
individual projects).
Supporting Free Software in general is something of a greater challenge.
In principle, one could donate to a distribution like Debian, although
for a long time (and maybe even now), Debian didn't seem to be
encouraging donations from individuals, at least as far as I could
discover. But then, the question is whether donations are effectively
funding Free Software development or availability and how the goals of
Debian or another organisation align with your own. I think that there
were also concerns about how the money is shared when it is pooled for
general distribution, who gets to apply for funding, whether it is
"deserved" or not, and so on.
I would argue that such concerns, along with vested interests not
wanting donations to fund competition to their commercial interests,
tends to lead to fairly substantial funds being distributed in arguably
ineffective ways. While I think that funding "hackathons" and travel
grants can be beneficial, one could have the opinion that donations
would be better spent paying for core technology development as opposed
to sending more money in the direction of airlines, meeting venues, and
food and drink conglomerates.
After many years, organisations like the Python Software Foundation,
perhaps motivated by negative media attention to underfunded
technological infrastructure, finally started to pay for core
development work. Even so, one could question some of the priorities of
such organisations. For example, the PSF has effectively chosen to run a
package distribution service that has to deal with all of the familiar
issues with allowing random people on the Internet to register their
projects and upload code that is hopefully not malicious, along with the
substantial issues of serving large volumes of data continually and on
demand in a timely fashion because people don't want to use established
software distributions.
I honestly ask myself, which "distribution-entity" to pay (and how
much) to put in my share?
Which distributors are you using to contribute /payments/?
(personally and professionally)
It sounds like something equivalent to a "fund manager" is required to
deal with the donations that individuals might wish to make. Instead of
a conventional investment, where someone invests a sum of money in a
fund whose manager has decided on a particular selection of investments,
and where the investor hopes that those investments will increase their
own wealth, we might have a portfolio of Free Software projects that an
individual might donate to, hoping to make a difference for the projects
concerned. For those not wanting to micromanage such portfolios, there
could be funds with different priorities.
Paul
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