7 ms·

Our 2016 Open Source Donations

403 points by wicket 10y ago

levemi 10y ago
I'm surprised DDG can donate so much money to open source. They must be doing well? Or is this money they've helped raise from their users? $225,000! That's a lot of money.
- jrockway 10y ago
  It is a lot of money, but it's about as much money as you'd need to hire one additional employee.
- jkldotio 10y ago
  DDG has done excellent work building their traffic[0] and have been getting a solid 10-12 million or so searches per day for a while. Even if you halve that due to !bang redirects and ad blocking and put a fairly low CPM on the ads they have quite a few millions or or low tens of millions coming in. I haven't been following too closely but my impression is Gabriel has been increasing staffing and other costs at a rate far lower than the increasing revenue. Additionally the donation itself got a vast amount of coverage in the relevant communities, including HN, so the expenditure is offset against advertising for user acquisition they didn't need to do. It probably also strengthened their core community, making their users more sticky. The donation also went to some of the infrastructure they use anyway. [0]https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
  - Gaelan 10y ago
    Not just ad-blocking; they have a "disable ads" option in their settings.
  - doomslay 10y ago
    Not to pour water on things, but after 8 years or so I'm not sure it's growing that well... After 6 years, Google was doing 200m searches a day. Google now does something like 4 billion a day. So duckduckgo, after 8 years of growth, has captured about 0.3% of the search market. At that sort of rate, it'll take decades to get any meaningful share, and that's assuming Google stand still, which they won't.
    - ownagefool 10y ago
      That's assuming you have to own the market. You don't, you just need more income than outcome. It would appear DDG is achieving that. Good for them I say.
    - kriro 10y ago
      That's not a bad share of the market. Their strategy is fairly smart/standard chasm crossing. Capture programmers/tech oriented users first. As long as they have solid growth in that department I wouldn't worry.
    - ae_keji 10y ago
      But Google also more or less owns the market now. Back then it was anyone's game (and internet usage in tdeveloped countries was growing rapidly, making the market a bit more volatile).
- madeofpalk 10y ago
  I actually don't think it is really that much money. It's as much as/less than a developer would cost. Seems to be a fairly good deal. I try to convince the bosses where I work to do something like this and they just roll their eyes at me.
- tagawa 10y ago
  The money is from DuckDuckGo but we do involve users by calling for nominations from the community (see https://duck.co/blog/post/247/2016-foss-donation-nominations https://duck.co/blog/post/247/2016-foss-donation-nominations )
MichaelBurge 10y ago
Donating to open-source seems like such a good use of charity money. I never give to charity because it always seems so abstract, or there might be better ways to solve the problem; with open source people are usually laboring over it with no recognition, and even a little seems like it has such high marginal benefit. I'm in-between jobs right now(occupied with a side project), but at some point I'd really like to fund feature development on some open source projects: * GNUCash has a solid heart, but has some usability issues that make it a pain to use in practice. * Freenet last I checked had only 1 fulltime developer. And he's probably taking a serious cut to market salary to work on it. * GHC could stand to have some performance optimization done on the compiler. * Inkscape or GIMP are handy to have around. Inkscape even has a page describing how you can host a fundraiser for targeted feature development, which is very rare for open-source. * I don't know that TOR needs much software help, but I wouldn't mind funding some exit nodes. It'd be nice if you could buy a locked-down black-box exit node that you could plug into your wall or something, that was guaranteed not to incriminate you. Maybe outside the scope of this, though. * Everyone has a little app or site they use where a few people are working without much benefit to maintain something you use all the time. Is there a good list of needy open-source software?
- jacalata 10y ago
  You don't donate to charity because maybe it isn't the perfect solution, but obviously giving money to open source is worthwhile?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- tyrust 10y ago
  > I never give to charity because it always seems so abstract, or there might be better ways to solve the problem It can be difficult to know whether or not you are making an impact with a donation. Fortunately there are sites like Charity Navigator [0] that audit aggregate and audit charities to make things easier. Some sites (like Giving What We Can [1] and GiveWell [2]) make it even simpler by suggesting a few charities that they deem most effective. For example, one of these top charities is the Against Malaria Foundation [3]. They're a fairly straightforward charity: they receive and review requests for mosquito nets and fulfill orders with donations. When you donate they tell you exactly how many nets were bought with your donation and where they were sent. In this way your dollars (approximately) directly help prevent the spread of malaria. Now, could this problem be better solved with donations to a malaria vaccine research group? Perhaps. For the time being, mitigating the issue with nets seems like a decent interim solution. My point is that there are many, many charities out there doing great work. It's worth looking into. (Another note: I don't mean to imply that you shouldn't give to open source projects. I am just trying to say that you could also consider giving to traditional charities.) [0] - http://www.charitynavigator.org/ http://www.charitynavigator.org/ [1] - https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/top-charities/ https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/top-charities/ [2] - http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities [3] - https://www.againstmalaria.com/ https://www.againstmalaria.com/
LeoPanthera 10y ago
I'm surprised to learn that Freenet is still a thing. What do people use it for?
- doublec 10y ago
  Decentralized microblogging using Sone, the twitter-like system on Freenet. Freemail, the encrypted email system. FMS, the forums. I also use the distributed data store for storing data. Basically anything you'd use IPFS for but more anonymity. Here's an example of using it for the backing store for my blog: https://bluishcoder.co.nz/2015/09/14/using-freenet-for-static-websites.html https://bluishcoder.co.nz/2015/09/14/using-freenet-for-stati... Here's a series of articles on writing dynamic apps for Freenet - in this case chat-like things http://www.draketo.de/light/english/freenet/communication-primitives-1-files-and-sites http://www.draketo.de/light/english/freenet/communication-pr...
- ArneBab 10y ago
  In addition to what doublec described: I use Freenet for confidential communication with friends. Encrypted Freenet traffic provides a cover which not only masks when we talk and what we talk about but also whether we talk at all. For details and how to do it, see http://www.draketo.de/english/freenet/connect-speak-freely http://www.draketo.de/english/freenet/connect-speak-freely
j0e1 10y ago
Respect!
analognoise 10y ago
I wish somebody would just give KiCad a few million dollars and we could be free of OrCad/Altium/Etc
- robert_foss 10y ago
  I couldn't agree more.
  - analognoise 10y ago
    The trouble is KiCad just won't cut it for complex boards. Eventually it could get there, but I ended up buying Pulsonix. Maybe starting a nonprofit to throw KiCad fundraisers?
aavotins 10y ago
Very nice. More companies should come up with posts like this to a) spread awareness b) encourage more people to work on open source projects(when there's money on the table). That would also clear up the question of how open source software can be sustainable and where do funds come from.
kriro 10y ago
It seems like a pretty great list at first glance. Lots of free speech and/or crypto related projects. Good job DDG, once again doing it right. I hope this generates some good PR for you :) [Now hurry and make DDG better for non-English languages, I want to use it for everything and more importantly want to make it the default for my parents, friends etc...well I guess strategically it doesn't make much sense if the target niche is developers but one can hope :D]
- tagawa 10y ago
  Message received and understood! Although we're currently trying to improve Instant Answers for developers, we're also continuing to work on better search results for mainstream users as awareness of privacy issues increases.
Lxr 10y ago
Wow, DDG has come a long way since I was last there a few years ago. It's great to have a serious player in the search space dedicated to privacy. After spending some time using it just now their ranking algorithm still feels somewhat inferior to Google though. This is not surprising given the resources Google devotes to machine learning and the like I guess. Does anyone know roughly how DDG arrive at their results? On topic, I think their donation is a great move.
- nilved 10y ago
  duckduckgoog.com
- tagawa 10y ago
  We use several sources[1], in particular Yahoo, Bing and Yandex, and then try to improve relevancy in the results as much as possible. [1] https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources
lowglow 10y ago
I'd love to bring really important open source projects to baqqer and support them with monthly pledges. I'd like them to be transparent and open with their direction and progress, while simultaneously letting the community there help guide and support their efforts. Does anyone know any great open source projects that would be open to this?
- hobofan 10y ago
  What benefits does baqqer provide over Patreon (for single Makers) and Bountysource Salt (for OSS projects)? How much does baqqer charge on the donations that a maker gets through it? I can see very little to no information without signing up.
  - lowglow 10y ago
    We help people, products, companies also grow through our community and forums. You can also perform micro-campaigns to raise smaller amounts of money for one-off required items. IMHO the experience is wholly different, because I wanted the crowdfunding experience to be much more intimate and supportive. Right now we charge 7% but only because we're trying to reach our server costs quickly since we're bootstrapped. Once we're at a break-even point we'll be dropping it down to 5% and remain competitive. Most information is (probably erroneously) here: https://baqqer.com/tos https://baqqer.com/tos
giulivo 10y ago
Now... this is certainly great, especially given the particular selection of projects receiving the donations. I've upvoted the article and hopefully more companies (aka open source consumers) will do the same. But then I wonder, what is that the community would benefit most from? Money or actual code contributions? I develop open source software and I get paid for doing it, which is a great luxury. Go DDG, raise the bar even further, employ people working on these projects if you don't have any already and even release more software!
frik 10y ago
The donations are great for open source projects. I just wonder if DDG is investing in their own crawler? With Yahoo BOSSS API bite the dust therefor loosing access to Bing search result. DDG nowadays has to rely on Yandex (Russian search engine) for their search result. The search results of DDG have gone from okay to a bit worse, so what's their long term strategy? Stay a meta-search-engine, or invest major resources to crawl the web themselves? What many people hate is high latency and to lower latency you cannot rely on third party APIs for the main search.
- amelius 10y ago
  Just wondering, how many GB per second does a modern search engine have to crawl?
- Sephr 10y ago
  There is an official Bing API coming out soon (a Bing developer recently mentioned this in an HN thread a couple days ago, although I can't find it atm), so they won't have to rely on Yandex for much longer. I have no idea if the pricing will be comparable to Yahoo BOSS though.
homero 10y ago
Where are they getting money
- ickwabe 10y ago
  https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates
agentgt 10y ago
I know duck is all about the trust but couldn't they have picked some non encryption/security OSS projects. It sort of reminds of the brief period where all these sustainability/eco startups where picked for awards or help.
- tagawa 10y ago
  We did have some non-encryption/security nominations from the community, but we decided in advance that this year's theme would be "raising the standard of trust online", hence this final list of recipients.

403 points by wicket 10y ago

I'm surprised DDG can donate so much money to open source. They must be doing well? Or is this money they've helped raise from their users? $225,000! That's a lot of money.

jrockway 10y ago
It is a lot of money, but it's about as much money as you'd need to hire one additional employee.
jkldotio 10y ago
DDG has done excellent work building their traffic[0] and have been getting a solid 10-12 million or so searches per day for a while. Even if you halve that due to !bang redirects and ad blocking and put a fairly low CPM on the ads they have quite a few millions or or low tens of millions coming in. I haven't been following too closely but my impression is Gabriel has been increasing staffing and other costs at a rate far lower than the increasing revenue. Additionally the donation itself got a vast amount of coverage in the relevant communities, including HN, so the expenditure is offset against advertising for user acquisition they didn't need to do. It probably also strengthened their core community, making their users more sticky. The donation also went to some of the infrastructure they use anyway. [0]https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
- Gaelan 10y ago
  Not just ad-blocking; they have a "disable ads" option in their settings.
- doomslay 10y ago
  Not to pour water on things, but after 8 years or so I'm not sure it's growing that well... After 6 years, Google was doing 200m searches a day. Google now does something like 4 billion a day. So duckduckgo, after 8 years of growth, has captured about 0.3% of the search market. At that sort of rate, it'll take decades to get any meaningful share, and that's assuming Google stand still, which they won't.
  - ownagefool 10y ago
    That's assuming you have to own the market. You don't, you just need more income than outcome. It would appear DDG is achieving that. Good for them I say.
  - kriro 10y ago
    That's not a bad share of the market. Their strategy is fairly smart/standard chasm crossing. Capture programmers/tech oriented users first. As long as they have solid growth in that department I wouldn't worry.
  - ae_keji 10y ago
    But Google also more or less owns the market now. Back then it was anyone's game (and internet usage in tdeveloped countries was growing rapidly, making the market a bit more volatile).
madeofpalk 10y ago
I actually don't think it is really that much money. It's as much as/less than a developer would cost. Seems to be a fairly good deal. I try to convince the bosses where I work to do something like this and they just roll their eyes at me.
tagawa 10y ago
The money is from DuckDuckGo but we do involve users by calling for nominations from the community (see https://duck.co/blog/post/247/2016-foss-donation-nominations https://duck.co/blog/post/247/2016-foss-donation-nominations )

MichaelBurge 10y ago

Donating to open-source seems like such a good use of charity money. I never give to charity because it always seems so abstract, or there might be better ways to solve the problem; with open source people are usually laboring over it with no recognition, and even a little seems like it has such high marginal benefit. I'm in-between jobs right now(occupied with a side project), but at some point I'd really like to fund feature development on some open source projects: * GNUCash has a solid heart, but has some usability issues that make it a pain to use in practice. * Freenet last I checked had only 1 fulltime developer. And he's probably taking a serious cut to market salary to work on it. * GHC could stand to have some performance optimization done on the compiler. * Inkscape or GIMP are handy to have around. Inkscape even has a page describing how you can host a fundraiser for targeted feature development, which is very rare for open-source. * I don't know that TOR needs much software help, but I wouldn't mind funding some exit nodes. It'd be nice if you could buy a locked-down black-box exit node that you could plug into your wall or something, that was guaranteed not to incriminate you. Maybe outside the scope of this, though. * Everyone has a little app or site they use where a few people are working without much benefit to maintain something you use all the time. Is there a good list of needy open-source software?

jacalata 10y ago
You don't donate to charity because maybe it isn't the perfect solution, but obviously giving money to open source is worthwhile?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
tyrust 10y ago
> I never give to charity because it always seems so abstract, or there might be better ways to solve the problem It can be difficult to know whether or not you are making an impact with a donation. Fortunately there are sites like Charity Navigator [0] that audit aggregate and audit charities to make things easier. Some sites (like Giving What We Can [1] and GiveWell [2]) make it even simpler by suggesting a few charities that they deem most effective. For example, one of these top charities is the Against Malaria Foundation [3]. They're a fairly straightforward charity: they receive and review requests for mosquito nets and fulfill orders with donations. When you donate they tell you exactly how many nets were bought with your donation and where they were sent. In this way your dollars (approximately) directly help prevent the spread of malaria. Now, could this problem be better solved with donations to a malaria vaccine research group? Perhaps. For the time being, mitigating the issue with nets seems like a decent interim solution. My point is that there are many, many charities out there doing great work. It's worth looking into. (Another note: I don't mean to imply that you shouldn't give to open source projects. I am just trying to say that you could also consider giving to traditional charities.) [0] - http://www.charitynavigator.org/ http://www.charitynavigator.org/ [1] - https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/top-charities/ https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/top-charities/ [2] - http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities [3] - https://www.againstmalaria.com/ https://www.againstmalaria.com/

LeoPanthera 10y ago

I'm surprised to learn that Freenet is still a thing. What do people use it for?

doublec 10y ago
Decentralized microblogging using Sone, the twitter-like system on Freenet. Freemail, the encrypted email system. FMS, the forums. I also use the distributed data store for storing data. Basically anything you'd use IPFS for but more anonymity. Here's an example of using it for the backing store for my blog: https://bluishcoder.co.nz/2015/09/14/using-freenet-for-static-websites.html https://bluishcoder.co.nz/2015/09/14/using-freenet-for-stati... Here's a series of articles on writing dynamic apps for Freenet - in this case chat-like things http://www.draketo.de/light/english/freenet/communication-primitives-1-files-and-sites http://www.draketo.de/light/english/freenet/communication-pr...
ArneBab 10y ago
In addition to what doublec described: I use Freenet for confidential communication with friends. Encrypted Freenet traffic provides a cover which not only masks when we talk and what we talk about but also whether we talk at all. For details and how to do it, see http://www.draketo.de/english/freenet/connect-speak-freely http://www.draketo.de/english/freenet/connect-speak-freely

j0e1 10y ago

Respect!

analognoise 10y ago

I wish somebody would just give KiCad a few million dollars and we could be free of OrCad/Altium/Etc

robert_foss 10y ago
I couldn't agree more.
- analognoise 10y ago
  The trouble is KiCad just won't cut it for complex boards. Eventually it could get there, but I ended up buying Pulsonix. Maybe starting a nonprofit to throw KiCad fundraisers?

aavotins 10y ago

Very nice. More companies should come up with posts like this to a) spread awareness b) encourage more people to work on open source projects(when there's money on the table). That would also clear up the question of how open source software can be sustainable and where do funds come from.

kriro 10y ago

It seems like a pretty great list at first glance. Lots of free speech and/or crypto related projects. Good job DDG, once again doing it right. I hope this generates some good PR for you :) [Now hurry and make DDG better for non-English languages, I want to use it for everything and more importantly want to make it the default for my parents, friends etc...well I guess strategically it doesn't make much sense if the target niche is developers but one can hope :D]

tagawa 10y ago
Message received and understood! Although we're currently trying to improve Instant Answers for developers, we're also continuing to work on better search results for mainstream users as awareness of privacy issues increases.

Lxr 10y ago

Wow, DDG has come a long way since I was last there a few years ago. It's great to have a serious player in the search space dedicated to privacy. After spending some time using it just now their ranking algorithm still feels somewhat inferior to Google though. This is not surprising given the resources Google devotes to machine learning and the like I guess. Does anyone know roughly how DDG arrive at their results? On topic, I think their donation is a great move.

nilved 10y ago
duckduckgoog.com
tagawa 10y ago
We use several sources[1], in particular Yahoo, Bing and Yandex, and then try to improve relevancy in the results as much as possible. [1] https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources

lowglow 10y ago

I'd love to bring really important open source projects to baqqer and support them with monthly pledges. I'd like them to be transparent and open with their direction and progress, while simultaneously letting the community there help guide and support their efforts. Does anyone know any great open source projects that would be open to this?

hobofan 10y ago
What benefits does baqqer provide over Patreon (for single Makers) and Bountysource Salt (for OSS projects)? How much does baqqer charge on the donations that a maker gets through it? I can see very little to no information without signing up.
- lowglow 10y ago
  We help people, products, companies also grow through our community and forums. You can also perform micro-campaigns to raise smaller amounts of money for one-off required items. IMHO the experience is wholly different, because I wanted the crowdfunding experience to be much more intimate and supportive. Right now we charge 7% but only because we're trying to reach our server costs quickly since we're bootstrapped. Once we're at a break-even point we'll be dropping it down to 5% and remain competitive. Most information is (probably erroneously) here: https://baqqer.com/tos https://baqqer.com/tos

giulivo 10y ago

Now... this is certainly great, especially given the particular selection of projects receiving the donations. I've upvoted the article and hopefully more companies (aka open source consumers) will do the same. But then I wonder, what is that the community would benefit most from? Money or actual code contributions? I develop open source software and I get paid for doing it, which is a great luxury. Go DDG, raise the bar even further, employ people working on these projects if you don't have any already and even release more software!

frik 10y ago

The donations are great for open source projects. I just wonder if DDG is investing in their own crawler? With Yahoo BOSSS API bite the dust therefor loosing access to Bing search result. DDG nowadays has to rely on Yandex (Russian search engine) for their search result. The search results of DDG have gone from okay to a bit worse, so what's their long term strategy? Stay a meta-search-engine, or invest major resources to crawl the web themselves? What many people hate is high latency and to lower latency you cannot rely on third party APIs for the main search.

amelius 10y ago
Just wondering, how many GB per second does a modern search engine have to crawl?
Sephr 10y ago
There is an official Bing API coming out soon (a Bing developer recently mentioned this in an HN thread a couple days ago, although I can't find it atm), so they won't have to rely on Yandex for much longer. I have no idea if the pricing will be comparable to Yahoo BOSS though.

homero 10y ago

Where are they getting money

ickwabe 10y ago
https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates

agentgt 10y ago

I know duck is all about the trust but couldn't they have picked some non encryption/security OSS projects. It sort of reminds of the brief period where all these sustainability/eco startups where picked for awards or help.

tagawa 10y ago
We did have some non-encryption/security nominations from the community, but we decided in advance that this year's theme would be "raising the standard of trust online", hence this final list of recipients.