this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2025
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How do donations come with strings? I've never...
Grants aren't donations.
Here's $100 but you have to spend it on materials for research, not executive salaries. It's called a restricted donation. You may hear that colleges and universities have million dollar endowments but still send out fundraising emails. This is because you might get a $200k donation from an alumni that is only to be used on tuition for student athletes and, yeah, you take that money because that means $200k that you don't need to spend there... But that you can only spend there.
So you've got to keep that money around unless you use it for those things.
All grants come with strings. You can go to grants.gov and click on hundreds of them.
I don't know where you donate, but Open Collective doesn't have a field for "enter your demands to accept this donation"
There's just no way to do that
I'm sure you're aware that businesses, especially with donations of that size, might engage in emailing contacts prior to donating...
No. Some do, but all the donations I've gotten from businesses on OC were just made.
Lots of companies just tell their staff how much, and they hung on OC and make those donations. They don't see a point to contacting them.
Right but if you're trying to score political points and ensure you can bend a open source project to your will, you do.
Not saying they're right for doing it but it's not so outside the realm of possibility that we should say "who does that?"
I think that's just a bribe in that case isn't it?
No. It's called earmarking. It's super common. I can do it at my local university.
Here's my $1000 donation, but you must remove one testicle from each member of your team...regardless of their assigned sex at birth. For $2000, we would like two. Thank you!
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
I don't know where you donate, but Open Collective doesn't have a field for "enter your demands to accept this donation"
There's just no way to do that
You could contact the company directly if you were doing a large donation/wanted to negotiate.
Usually I assume those are phishing and ignore.