Comment by gsf_emergency_4

18 hours ago

NLNet (backed by EU) is a society that also funds opensource dev by donations

https://nlnet.nl/donating/

They should get more wellknown

Judging by the lack of upvotes and nondisclosure of how much they get, my guess is that 99% of people have for some reason conflicted feelings about funding opensource even from taxes

I just want a organization that I can trust and share about to have maximum benefit to society for open source.

Now there are 2 ideas that I have: One, to raise more awareness about open source and how it has some gems. The best low hanging fruits of privacy for the world might be f-droid, signal (doesn't require any specific hardware as long as they have android) and grapheneos(depends if they have a pixel)

But that being said, I thought that if I share about open source and how it can be good but it requires your funding to fix the chicken and egg problem. People would feel convinced to donate.

I might say them to donate to nlnet. But I don't think many people would.

I don't think open source needs an evanglist or somebody telling somebody else to do something. I am deeply pessimistic about the state of open source in the sense that it's out of my control and my trust of human society is eroding day by day.

Literally nobody I talk to makes me feel like something can be done about this / gives hope and I doubt it so much now. I was so much optimistic about its future but I am genuinely pessimistic now and the only reason I try to be hopeful is that I don't want hopelessness. I don't want to sit down and watch but fucking hell, the world sure damn well wants me to.

The only hope I got was maybe through raylib creator's github post about history of raylib which inspired me and it seems like the best way for open source could be to become a teacher but I have conflicted opinions about it because I like building things that are niche solutions to niche problems I have. That's how I started loving open source more. Some solution which I can always use. which I have starred with me. Not sure if I should even be a teacher or something else or if how that fixing my own problems attitude goes towards teaching. I don't fucking know and I am tired of pretending that I know. idk wtf is wrong with the world that good things can happen but they won't. We are in a fucked up world in which mediocrity is benefited and like I have convinced myself that maybe this is the equilibra of altruism/evilness in the world maybe directly governed by biology/physics/the laws of the universe. But I can't but see how things got better in the past yet it seems that people have just accepted that things can't change now. How were people in the past doing so many massive changes like french revolution. I was asked by my teacher 3 years or more ago to write about it and I made things on the spot because I read one book (everything is fucked a book about hope) and uh I just somehow translated that people wanted hope and french revolution provided it. I always thought that if we can show the world something which can be better which just requires all of us to put in a little effort, then things would get better since we would all logically agree that this is the better thing, just like how I can show them hope and then we can have another thing like french revolution (I mean something's that good like democracy), but now I am wondering if that's how the things work. Maybe I was naive but I need to do more research on french revolution's hope idea, idk.

  • In the past the material resources of opposing forces were evenly matched: french revolution happened because the state had tenacious control over arms. Today armies do sometimes side "with the people", but mostly to prevent the politicians from going too far.

    Real revolutions today have to be quiet. Besides NLnet, which I personally find trustworthy, and to which anybody can try to apply for funding, there's also Linux and FreeBSD. Those are real techno revolutions, but I'm optimistic that they can be taken to the next level. (2% support)

    Be the change you want to see in the world, like Gandhi says. It's simple, though not easy. Join NLnet, or contribute to F-droid, or work on reverse engineering advanced proprietary tech. Find and learn and think about how revolutionary tech orgs are run. Most important thing to learn: how they can survive on support from only 1% of humanity. Thinking like that, it's actually easier now than any point in history.

    (In another sense 1% is already a sweet spot, see

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45572427

    World domination is a bug not a feature. The Linux kernel is the revolution. Desktop Linux is not)