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About half of the top 50 philanthropist dollars in the United States in 2014 were given by tech entrepreneurs, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Overall, the technology sector gave away $5 billion that year, though their charitable contributions dropped precipitously last year to $1.3 billion (possibly skewed due to the absence of "mega-gifts," such as a $2 billion donation by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2014).
"There is a very real surge of philanthropy from tech sector leaders," says David Callahan, founder and editor of Inside Philanthropy, a news website that tracks nonprofits. "Many of these folks believe in giving early in life while still in their careers, as opposed to a more traditional model of waiting until later in life."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 11 2016, @08:03PM
This idealistic attitude does not work in reality. I know because I live by this method, to my continual disappointment.
I contribute to open source projects in the form of code patches to fix bugs and add features, things that I know would be useful to others. I always provide rationale for my changes, but I contribute under pseudonyms, and I have not affixed my real name to anything for the past ten years.
My contributions are summarily ignored. Meanwhile narcissistic self aggrandizing rockstar coders drive by and dump buggy untested code which is always accepted, even when the code does not compile and the maintainer has to rewrite it.
Unless announced with trumpets, giving is futile.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 11 2016, @11:44PM
You should review why you give. It sounds like you want credit but do not take it. Most code projects out there are run by the 'in kids'. They have their buddies. They are not interested in actually making good code.
One project I contributed to accepted my fix. The next dude who commented on it got all pissed off about the style of the code. Right until one of the other dudes said 'dude YOU wrote that and he just fixed your math error'. Many are looking for a reason to reject you. As it means they lose a bit of power. Power they never really had in the first place. Another project I contributed to I sped up a core function by about 4x. What did the whole group get bent out of shape about? I misspelled a word. Not one critique on the code. Yet they still had to give me a 2 paragraph rant about the spelling. My interest in that project quickly went to 0. A 'hey you misspelled xyz' would have been enough.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 12 2016, @06:15AM
Sometimes I wonder why the "in kids" open their code projects to contributors at all. I have a project which I've worked on for many years, and the whole thing is open source, but all work is mine and I don't allow edits, because it's my project and I want to work alone.