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While donations from corporations is great, my hope is that developers will jump on the micro-payment bandwagon. If every developer who uses FreeBSD in one cap

While donations from corporations is great, my hope is that developers will jump on the micro-payment bandwagon. If every developer who uses FreeBSD in one capacity or another donated $1 per month, the FreeBSD Foundation would likely never need to ask for donations again. I currently do quarterly donations to FreeBSD Foundation and Apache Foundation, and some hand-picked developers in the technologies I use regularly, whom I would consider indispensable in the open source community. While it's not $1M, if everyone were doing it, none of those groups would depend on corporate donations. I have even thought of a project that I may bring to life one day, if enough interest exists. Find the most indispensable members of the open source community and put crowdfunding efforts together to buy them out. In other words, put enough money on the table that they won't need to work for 1,2,3 years at a time. Working tirelessly on open source projects is something these people have already proven they love to do, and will almost certainly continue if suddenly they came across a windfall like this. My guess is these kinds of things have been attempted, but for one reason or another have never really gained the support they would need.

kev009 12y ago
Diverse donations are also necessary for 501c(3) status in the US, so yes everyone please give a few dollars every year!
ErrantX 12y ago
Given that the freeBSD foundation receives approx. $400,00-500,000 in donations from less than 20 corps/individuals... I think rather a lot of developers would have to donate :) Are there 42,000 FreeBSD developers willing to contribute?
- Taek 12y ago
  $1 per month is an incredibly trivial number. Less trivial is how difficult it is to set up payment in this fashion. If getting payment was as simple as convincing developers that it was worth $1 per month, I'm sure you could get to $1m per year (many would do much better than $1 per month).
- datashovel 12y ago
  That is alot of developers using FreeBSD, but my ideal scenario is where these groups don't rely on corporations or just a few wealthy people for donations. Also I wouldn't necessarily advocate letting corporations off the hook. If every corporation / small business / organization who uses FreeBSD in their infrastructure also contributed $1/month I think this would easily put them over the top. I think developers should be just as active with advocating to the companies they work for to also do micro-payments to open source projects / foundations they depend on for their infrastructure.

kev009 12y ago

Diverse donations are also necessary for 501c(3) status in the US, so yes everyone please give a few dollars every year!

ErrantX 12y ago

Given that the freeBSD foundation receives approx. $400,00-500,000 in donations from less than 20 corps/individuals... I think rather a lot of developers would have to donate :) Are there 42,000 FreeBSD developers willing to contribute?

Taek 12y ago
$1 per month is an incredibly trivial number. Less trivial is how difficult it is to set up payment in this fashion. If getting payment was as simple as convincing developers that it was worth $1 per month, I'm sure you could get to $1m per year (many would do much better than $1 per month).
datashovel 12y ago
That is alot of developers using FreeBSD, but my ideal scenario is where these groups don't rely on corporations or just a few wealthy people for donations. Also I wouldn't necessarily advocate letting corporations off the hook. If every corporation / small business / organization who uses FreeBSD in their infrastructure also contributed $1/month I think this would easily put them over the top. I think developers should be just as active with advocating to the companies they work for to also do micro-payments to open source projects / foundations they depend on for their infrastructure.