> The easiest method of donating to Debian is via PayPal to Software in the Public Interest, a non-profit organization that holds assets in trust for Debian.
> Software in the Public Interest (SPI) is a non-profit corporation registered in the state of New York founded to act as a fiscal sponsor for organizations that develop open source software and hardware. Our mission is to help substantial and significant open source projects
> To achieve the 5 years of support, and properly cover all Debian packages, Freexian organizes a corporate sponsorship campaign with the goal of funding the work of multiple Debian contributors who are established as independent workers.
> If you are not yet convinced, here are seven reasons why you should help fund the Debian Long Term Support initiative (LTS):
Why not donate to the maintainers of Debian, Software in the Public Interest? http://www.debian.org/donations
They are the root of all those awesome dpkg's that we all know and love.
There are numerous corporations paying contributors or employees to work on Debian, and supporting Debian in other ways, Canonical for example, or the Debian partners and Debian consultants and most of the LTS team comes from Freexian.
Take a look at the website for Debian's parent organization, Software In The Public Interest, and see all the projects they are responsible for: https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/
Debian: http://www.spi-inc.org/donations/ (mention "Debian" in the memo field (if cheque) or in the reference (if wire) (tax deductible for U.S. citizens)
I'd recommend donating to organizations that are actually making software freedom happen by writing and maintaining free software. Ubuntu (finally!) has a donation link when you click to download the installer:
You can also donate to some other distro like Debian, or to your favorite upstream project. But very little, if any, of donations to the FSF go directly to free software, and most of it goes to political viewpoints you may or may not agree with and to fights with people who are writing free software.
Either there is a code contributor pushing for functionality (Example sendfile/nginx) or a donor suggesting a path forward or a volunteer given free time.
Every foundation goals can be driven via sponsorship. At the end everything is simplify as who pays the bills at the end of the month?
This raises the old question: Who pays for the free in free software?
You can donate to NLNet[1], which itself is an organization that funds FOSS development. Or you can just look at the software/dependencies you already use an donate to those developers ;)
There are actually several non-profits holding Debian assets, in years with a physical DebConf usually a new or existing organisation is enlisted to hold funds for that conference.
I donated and you should too. https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/ You get a t-shirt and your name/company publicly listed as a supporter (if you want). They're a charity, for tax purposes.
More importantly, they use their money efficiently and have tangible positive results.
Unfortunately due to the VMware lawsuit they've lost some corporate sponsors. Note that on the whole, their GPL enforcement is not litigious and not profitable. And that's just one part of their overall mission.
Backing your FOSS project with a non-profit organization is a great idea. Creating your own such organization, on the other hand, usually isn't unless you're a very large project (on par with LLVM, Apache, etc).
Instead, consider joining one of the several umbrella organizations that support FOSS projects (including managing donations and legal issues), such as Software Freedom Conservancy (which covers projects like Git, Mercurial, QEMU, Samba, Boost, Inkscape, and PyPy), or Software in the Public Interest (which covers Debian, PostgreSQL, ffmpeg, LibreOffice, MinGW, Arch, freedesktop.org, and others).
> The easiest method of donating to Debian is via PayPal to Software in the Public Interest, a non-profit organization that holds assets in trust for Debian.
https://www.spi-inc.org/
> Software in the Public Interest (SPI) is a non-profit corporation registered in the state of New York founded to act as a fiscal sponsor for organizations that develop open source software and hardware. Our mission is to help substantial and significant open source projects
Edit: But also, freexian
https://www.freexian.com/lts/debian/
> To achieve the 5 years of support, and properly cover all Debian packages, Freexian organizes a corporate sponsorship campaign with the goal of funding the work of multiple Debian contributors who are established as independent workers.
> If you are not yet convinced, here are seven reasons why you should help fund the Debian Long Term Support initiative (LTS):
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