Developer Thank You Site?

[mrjohnston]

I was reading some postings recently about KDE 4.2 RC1 and just got tired of all the negative comments and overall rude nature of many users. I figure these people developing software do it for free, and it seems counter productive to constantly be so negative and rude (complaints versus suggestions).

I was wondering if there is a site anywhere where you could select an opensource project and have it mail the developers a congratulations or a thank you. I was also wondering if there wasn't if any developers would actually like this, or if they would appreciate it more if it didn't potentially fill their inbox :) Maybe a site with projects and/or users where you could give "thank you's" kind of like ubuntuforums has now to them so its pretty non-invasive in their life, but can hopefully make sure they know how much they and their work is appreciated.

Just some thoughts and I was hoping to see what others know about anything currently out there or if the idea itself is bad/good.

[Thirtysixway]

http://www.kde.org/support/

[glotz]

http://www.debian.org/donations

[mrjohnston]

Nevermind then. I know how to donate, but I, and most people I would think, would have difficulty donating to every project we use. I was more thinking of ways to at least send a positive message to them even if you don't have the money or have already donated elsewhere for the year. But perhaps just donating to what projects I can when I can is the best way to help them know they are appreciated.

I guess that just gives me one question people maybe could answer. If I have 100 dollars to donate, is it better to give many projects 2-5 dollars each, or should I give fewer projects a more significant amount each?

[glotz]

I think from your perspective you should donate proportionally to how important and useful you find the projects.

Derbian is the backbone of the Free Software ecosystem, it's a really community owned distro without a corporate sugar daddy or other motives besides making an excellent and free operating system. It's also the base for a vast number of other distros, Ubuntu included, as you probably know.

Donating could be seen as a very banal way of saying thanks but the fact remains the Free Software developers are doing wonderful things for the all of us and they need to eat. :)