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Which FOSS projects have enough funding that we should donate elsewhere? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 23 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

36 comments fedilink hide all child comments

There were some posts over the holiday season asking for projects to donate to, and for those who have the means to comfortably do so, this is an important gift to consider.

If there's only a limited amount each of us is able to give, I assume there's no point giving it all to, for one example, The Linux Foundation, because a small personal donation is trivial next to the ~$15,000,000 USD they receive from sponsors dependent on them[1]. I understand that funding sources can be a major and profound source of bias[2] and ideally we would be, for example, helping to make Firefox independent of Google, but until we have more collective power, it's not worth letting smaller important projects struggle instead.

So, which important projects should we leave to the sponsors, and which really need our support?

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

Maybe I can say Wikipedia because if it’s mediawiki software. Every year they ask for money but a lot of their funds don’t go towards the Wikipedia project.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Getting your ideas from Elon I see.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Did you even read what I said? Go look where their money goes, it’s mostly for random outreach programs.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goes/#%3A%7E%3Atext=Donations+to+the+Wikimedia+Foundation%2Cour+ecosystem+of+Wikimedia+projects.

58% goes to fundraising, administrative and technological costs. The rest has some money going towards, but no limited to, other programs.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f6/Wikimedia_Foundation_2024_Audited_Financial_Statements.pdf

Only thing I can find in their financials that would maybe qualify as "random outreach" would be "awards and grants", at 26mil last year out of 185mil revenue, or 14%.

https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Community_Fund

As far as I can tell, it's not particularly random.

Maybe I'm missing something?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 hours ago

To me that still shows most doesn’t go where you think, especially when volunteers do the hard work.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

Their only defence is to support other mediawiki projects, but it is ambiguous we don't know how the money goes. The project, whatever that is, should speak for itself instead of going through Wikipedia.