I agree with the general idea that contributing to these projects is good. However, the link is slightly misleading:
"GNU programs are used billions of time every day all over the world. However, the intellectual property owners, the Free Software Foundation, don't make a cent from it. What a raw deal! This project aims to fix that by monetizing many popular command line tools that GNU maintains."
Maybe true, but keep in mind that the main coreutils maintainers (including the parent) are funded by Red Hat. There are plenty of FOSS projects that do suffer from a lack of funding; coreutils, GCC, etc are certainly not one of them. As such, if your goal is to help the FOSS community at large, you might want to consider channeling the money to other important projects.
Maybe the donation link already does such channeling; I am curious about this.
It's a joke that's very much not obviously a joke. This is social commentary about the state of free software and/or Hacker News, I'm just not sure what the social commentary actually is.
Maybe true, but keep in mind that the main coreutils maintainers (including the parent) are funded by Red Hat. There are plenty of FOSS projects that do suffer from a lack of funding; coreutils, GCC, etc are certainly not one of them. As such, if your goal is to help the FOSS community at large, you might want to consider channeling the money to other important projects.
Maybe the donation link already does such channeling; I am curious about this.