Over the years, my various employers have had programs that allow employees to donate to charities via direct withdrawal from a paycheck. I donate to certain open source projects, but the donations are done haphazardly. Is there any organized way to select open source projects from a menu and allocate support via PayPal or some similar scheme?
I think the open source community does some outstanding work, and I don’t feel comfortable being just a consumer. I’m not a programmer and I probably don’t have other talents or time that that would be useful to these efforts, but I do want to be supportive. I can’t keep track of all the donation methods advertised by the projects I benefit from, so I am wondering if there is an existing solution, such as a online menu of projects, I could use to donate financially either one time or on an ongoing basis.
There isn’t a centralized platform. Its not possible that everyone in Open Source could agree on such a thing. There are a few that seem popular: Patreon, Liberapay, Github sponsors, paypal, ko-fi, tipee.
I think It would be helpful if there was at least a site where projects could voluntarily make their donation methods known. Having a consistent format with the name of each project, along with a brief project description and links to donation methods would seem to be a good thing to raise visibility.
I think most make it known on their website if they take donation at all.
And not only that. Many open source softwares even propose you to donate some money when you download, usually on Windows, their softwares (e.g. LibreOffice, QGIS, etc).
If you are on Linux it is difficult to appreciate this because you update their softwares automatically through your Distro repository
There is https://liberapay.com/
It’s a non-profit organisation running an open-source platform for donations to organisations, teams or individuals.
That is an awesome attitude!
There’s often also ways to contribute without coding (documentation being one obvious large chunk), however that’s also not an option for many people (time constraints, language barrier, …) - donations are a great way to help out.
Thank you for the link. That is the kind of solution I was looking for. I assume the organization has to take some of the donation amounts to sustain the service, but I hope the amount is negligible.
It does not take anything from your donations. It uses it’s own platform to collect donations to run/improve the platform. Some of your donations will be “lost” to the payment processors (I believe at the moment that’s stripe and paypal).
