A whole lot of projects on Sourceforge have a donation button. I support Open Source software but I hate to admit that I've never contributed any funds to a project. I have given $20 to the Obama campaign though! Just wondering if people are actually donating money to Open Source software and if anyone had an estimate of the amount raised through donations across projects and for specific projects
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BrowseDo Open Source projects really generate funds from donations??
By netmeon - May 6th 2008 at 04:57 AM
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Add AnswerI am sure they make _some_ money using donations, but I'm sure they don't make bank! I mean, sites like Wikipedia thrive off donations - cash and kind, as does the Apache foundation.
No. They don't. Even Wikipedia @ 300 million pageviews a day (or something crazy like that) gets $3M a year in donations. So that translates to $0.00000001 in donations per page view. I might have screwed up on the zeros but you get the idea.
Bottom Line, don't start an open source initiative unless you REALLY love it! :)
Donations are CRUCIAL for the open source movement and please read Mayank Sharma's post on the economics of Open Source donations - http://www.packtpub.com/article/the-economics-of-open-source-donations
By an anonymous user on June 24th 2008 at 04:12 PM
three million still sounds pretty good to me!
By an anonymous user on June 24th 2008 at 06:31 PM
Doesn't sound so good when the estimated commercial value of Wikipedia is over $3 BILLION!
By an anonymous user on June 24th 2008 at 06:31 PM
i.e. donations are less than 0.1% of the value of the entity...
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