Each year I’ve made it a point to donate the value equivalent to what I would have once paid for Windows licensing to my most used Linux distribution. That is usually followed up by a one-off donation to some individual program of my choosing. Sometimes it would be through their donations portal, and other times directly to core developers who accept direct donations. It can be disjointed and I’ve found myself having to decide whether to send money toward a project’s web or forum hosting, node operators (in the case of Tor) instead of the software development teams, to small one-man projects or to larger established projects, or otherwise.
And that’s where the value of having umbrella organizations that can help fund multiple projects presents itself. Now, at first what might come to mind is something like the FSF or the EFF. But as these organizations increasingly chase social activism rather than technological freedom, one begins to question what value is actually being derived from one’s generosity. You would be forgiven for thinking that the Mozilla Foundation might use it to pay developer hours on Firefox. But if you look closely, they say right there that it gets used for advocacy campaigns (code speak for agenda pushing) and for their annual “MozFest” (where they spend a lot of time discussing things that aren’t Firefox).
So what are some good umbrella organizations acting as stewards of software freedom?
NLnet have been absolutely hitting it out of the park for the last few years. NLnet actively seeks out tools and standards which stand to benefit free and private computing and the internet at large. Among the projects to which they have allocated funding;
It seems like every month I read about something excellent like Coreboot finding itself the recipient of NLnet funding. If you would like to help push the internet and digital technology, more broadly, in the right direction, check out their donation portal.
SPI had originally been founded for Debian, by folks involved with Debian, but has since expanded well beyond that. They distribute funds to several projects under their wings, including;
They seem to be well aligned with the interests of NLnet, with the two even sharing some recipients. Donation information found at Donations to Software in the Public Interest, Inc.. Don’t be put off by “Inc.” in the name, SPI is wholly a non-profit.
While their association with Outreachy is a bit off-putting, I definitely class SFC with the aforementioned funding organizations. With some stars adorning their shoulders;
If you can overlook some of their personal politics, the actual work they’ve done is voluminous. SFC are most certainly a candidate for strengthening digital freedom. If interested, some information for sending a few shekels their way.
Since discovering these organizations, I’ve shifted my giving strategy. A side benefit of doing so is that the financial intermediaries (and their partners) don’t get information from which they can infer specific software that you use. And instead of seeking out dozens of disparate projects to throw money at, many of them have been collated under the bank roll of these non-profits. If you’ve benefitted from the excellent work of any of these projects and wish to gift back, this may be the most frictionless way to do so.