If you go to the wikipedia site, you see the donation report. The funding handling is well organized, because wikipedia is a big project. As a matter of fact most big projects are handled by a foundation or supported by large company as written here.
Now what happen, when a little project get a big donation ? That’s the intersseting story related in the post : What Do Small Open Source Projects Do With Money Not MuchDOT.
This is a good question that haven’t cross my mind before, and it makes me wonder, what would I do if one of my two open source projects get such donation ? Honestly I don’t know. The obvious thing is to spend the money for development purpose however this is clearly not easy because finding someone that is able to dig into the code and improve it is very hard. I guess that the best use would be to hire someone to improve the user experience. Something like a better documentation or an improved GUI and packaging. It make me wonder if creating a startup specialized in helping project using donation might be a good idea.
looking forward for more information about this. thanks for sharing. Eugene
Thanks for the comment. I am also curious to see what other people that wrote open source software do with the donation money. An interesting story is what Geohot (a famous iphone “hacker”): We open a free wiki to share knowledge : http://iphonejtag.blogspot.com/2008/07/iphone-wiki.html.
I think this is a terrific idea.