I've just donated. It's an important project and Werner Koch needs to be rewarded.
I feel that we, as a community, are really bad at supporting some of the opensource projects that powers our infrastructure. I'm not sure what can be done to improve this. Maybe we need a foundation that raises money for those projects and does the marketing needed to remind us to donate.
I for one wouldn't mind giving say 30 euros/month to be redistributed between projects like GPG, openssh, varnish, nginx, openssl...
You are right that we, as a community, are really bad at supporting key open source infrastructure. But I also think that relying on donations from individuals like us is a fundamentally wrong model. I don't benefit directly from GPG, but I benefit from many services that make use of GPG and make lots of money off of me.
I completely agree that the services and companies that rely on those technologies should also contribute.
But as a software developer, I use openssh daily in my job. I use tmux, I use nginx, I use openssl and a lot more opensource projects and they allow me to make a living. So, it makes sense for me to contribute.
I don't disagree at all, but as you say, you do those things in your job. It's likely that you also use them outside your job for personal purposes, which is why I agree that it makes sense for you to contribute. But most employees don't (and shouldn't) feel like it's their duty to pay for the tools they use to do their jobs.
After the big openssl bug, wasn't there some intent among some of the existing foundations to try to identify open source keystone projects and get them additional attention & support? It seems like the privacy advocacy groups might route some spending to GPG just as a pragmatic matter.
I feel that we, as a community, are really bad at supporting some of the opensource projects that powers our infrastructure. I'm not sure what can be done to improve this. Maybe we need a foundation that raises money for those projects and does the marketing needed to remind us to donate.
I for one wouldn't mind giving say 30 euros/month to be redistributed between projects like GPG, openssh, varnish, nginx, openssl...