views:

278

answers:

11

I use several open source tools in my day to day development - and they save me a lot of money.

In the absense of donating any time to these projects I decided to donate some cash to a project once per year.

If you were going to donate $100 which project would get your vote?

+2  A: 

My vote is going for TortoiseSVN this year.

Ryan
+1  A: 

The JavaScript framework of your choice. Dealing with all of the cross-browser idiosyncrasies is a nightmare and the framework developers save a lot of web developers a lot of time by dealing with those issues.

VirtuosiMedia
+8  A: 

You should read Jeff's post about donating $5000 to an open source project and if open source projects can actually benefit from donations. Basically, the project coordinator said that the money sat for three months without being touched because they couldn't find an appropriate usage for it.

Anyway, I find the open source projects that affect me the most are the big ones - Linux, Firefox, GNU, SVN, etc. I think the best thing for OSS is spreading the word, increasing adoption, awareness, and participants.

go minimal
Wow - interesting article, thanks. Think the idea about hiring a doco writer was a good one.
Ryan
+1  A: 

I'd spread out the $100 (if that is your donation budget) and donate to different projects. If you is a company, you might as well add a 0. :)

Till
+8  A: 

The smallest project you use that gives you the most benefit probably needs and deserves your money the most.

Pete
Yeah, I agree. The smallest open source project that doesn't have as big a following, and probably doesn't have alot of donations already is probably the best one to give to. You can encourage the little guy this way
Chris Pietschmann
Other metrics you might want to consider would be the buggiest, or most feature lacking (provided they are being actively worked on or you could talk to the developer(s) and be sure the money would free them up to work on it.)
Sam Hasler
+1  A: 

http://www.vim.org/

Ken
+1  A: 

Doxygen is worth a donation, I think!

koschi
+1  A: 

Another strong contender is PuTTY

Ryan
+2  A: 

I use Wikipedia almost every day in the office. It sure saves me a lot of time. Although it's not a "regular" tool (framework / executable), I really think it's a fair candidate.

Ron Klein
A: 

valgrind is a pretty useful tool for checking profiling, and is well maintained.

Amit Kumar
I agree. And it's very innovative, quite revolutionary.
+2  A: 

Donating to a one-man project rather than something a lot larger like the Mozilla Foundation is probably a better use of $100. It will directly encourage him to work on that product and also give him a good feeling that people out there use his software and are grateful for it.

Coxy