And even then, redistributing money will inherently make the organization have political issues. Choosing who "deserves" it is just hard work, takes time, needs an internal political alignment and strategy where the people working on this project are just doing it for fun on their free time.

In fact their decision is pretty mature and nice : they have enough to support the project costs but they don’t want the project to become their job and that’s exactly what money flowing over a hobby does : changing it to a job.

Mozilla is a prime example of this.

I think many have donated to Mozilla thinking they were donating to Firefox only to later realize donations never reach Firefox.

I know this adds complexity, but one way to handle this is simply transparency, and another way is to add choice: on the donation web page, give donors a choice if they want their money to possibly be used to fund other, related projects, that might be short on funding, and then list those projects. Funding ffmpeg, for instance, seems fair since it's a dependency. They could also just make a selection matrix on the donation page, allowing people to select allowed recipients, so for instance they could allow the Android client, and disallow the Windows client.

The Mozilla case shows why it's bad to not have transparency.

Wikipedia is much worse about it. They even brag about the other charities they've redirected our donations to.

That signaled the last time I would ever donate to Wikipedia.

They could donate to their dependencies that need it?

Still directly supporting the code running in the project. Balances out that people seem happier to donate to the UI/product layer than something like ffmpeg. Might be a bad example, but I’m sure some of their dependencies are underfunded.

It's still opening up a whole political mess. Which dependencies need/deserve it the most? With the backlash on this post, I cannot imagine an actual list with actual dollar amounts. No matter the list, there will be an army of upset folks, this time with actual dollar amounts to complain.

Like others said, they're hobbyists providing a service in spare time. Asking them to be money managers is not a trivial ask.

May I ask which open source projects you maintain?

It's one thing if you donate to wikipedia and it ends up at some random wikimedia project you've never heard of and a completely different thing if you donate to Jellyfin and it ends up at Jellyfin Android.

But as others have said, the hax office might not like it

It may be a bit different, but there's still plenty of potential for people to donate and not be happy that their donation is forwarded to a third party Jellyfin Android if they personally have no interest in the existence of Jellyfin Android.

(I also agree with various other reasons in other people's comments, most of all that this lets donors vote with their money on which third party projects that work on top of Jellyfin get the money, rather than Jellyfin having to decide which ones deserve what proportion of spare money.)

Even if you donated to Jellyfin, and the money went to the developers of Jellyfin clients, which are listed everywhere as part of the project?

I'd prefer to donate to the clients I use - there are many I wouldn't use (for whatever reason) and so donations to them do not help my goals. For that matter there are causes completely unrelated to jellyfin that I also support: knowing jellyfin has enough money frees to some money to donate to those other causes.

There are more deserving projects in the world than there is money. If you don't want to manage who gets the money directly (this could be called micromanage!) then something like united way which redonates to projects that you haven't heard of is probably a good use of your money. (United way is controversial and they do not support open source but they are still a good use of your money if you want to do the most good with the least thought)

If you're trying to make a donation to a project but want to be able to specify what they can(not) do with the money, then you're not really trying to make a donation.

"Here are some groceries, bring them home to your children and don't trade them for drugs"

Is a donation even if the other party is upset about it.

There's a whiff of a suggestion with the way this comment is framed that makes it seem like the intent is to be a contradiction of the one it's a reply to, but it isn't.

ALL donations to non-profit organizations are purpose-bound to some extend. That's why the relevant organizational structures that allow for tax-exempt donations usually legally bind the origanization to using that money to further it's stated mission and not blow it all on hookers for the board or whatever other pet projects the organization's leadership wants to further. This is how donations are SUPPOSED to work: contribute money towards a COMMON goal, not towards someone else's goal. Donations are not free money. It is a real problem when organizations become so broad you don't really know what you are donating towards. Often such organizations end up using deceptive tactics where they use one of their popular projects (e.g. Wikipedia) to drum up funds that they intend to use for unrelated projects that are not advertised to the donor. The best solution is to keep the scope of the organization tight and tell donors to donated to other organizations as well based on their own preferences. This seems to be what Jellyfin has chosen to do and it's the right choice.

Steve has a car. The car is yellow. All yellow cars are driven by Steve. (Except not.)

You have posted an observation about non-profit organizations and described a defining characteristic of donations that go to them. You have not given a defining characteristic of donations.

> This is how donations are SUPPOSED to work: contribute money towards a COMMON goal

You mean like shoring up the Jellyfin ecosystem?

> Donations are not free money.

Donations are free money. (When the donation is money; donated clothes are obviously not free money—they're free clothes.)

If I bought a cheeseburger, I would feel seriously deceived if they turned around and bought cheese from a diary provider and buns from a bakery and...

Jellyfin of course spends the money on ingredients that go into the project: “if you do want to help us cover some operating expenses like our VPS hosting, domains, developer licenses, metadata API keys, and other incidental expenses, check out our OpenCollective page to donate.” https://jellyfin.org/contribute/

Why would anyone feel deceived?

i want a cheeseburger