# Charitable contributions from Amazon to the FreeBSD Foundation



## drhowarddrfine (Jun 14, 2021)

I didn't know this but a guy who used to work for me just started at Amazon. Amazon will contribute 0.5% of every purchase you make to your favorite charity and that includes the FreeBSD Foundation! There is nothing different, the products and prices are all the same, you just have to go to https://smile.amazon.com/ whenever you purchase anything for the contribution to take effect.

Log into your account if you have one and go to that link. It will ask if that's what you want to do and you have to check a box and enter "FreeBSD" as the organization. That's it!

What an easy and great way to support FreeBSD.


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## Crivens (Jun 14, 2021)

0.05%would be, well, half a peanut. I ordered stuff for about 1k in the last month(don't ask) and 0.05% would be 50 cents. Better than nothing. The message they show me talks about 0.5%. That would have been 5€ for the foundation. Do they have a SEPA? I would drop them more than that if it wasn't going trough paypull or other services.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jun 14, 2021)

Crivens said:


> 0.05% would be 50 cents.


Corrected. It's 0.5% making your contribution a dollar. 

My wife's drying the money well on Amazon. Turns out, she signed up for it but didn't know you had to use the actual Smile site for it to work. Now that it matters to me, I'll make sure she does it right.

While your dollar doesn't sound like muich, a thousand people contributing a dollar every so often adds up to more than their getting this way now.


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## trev (Jun 15, 2021)

Maybe someone should tell the Foundation ...


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## grahamperrin@ (Jun 18, 2021)

trev said:


> the Foundation



<https://freebsdfoundation.org/donate/> there's _Amazon Smile_. 
The option first appeared in 2016, here's the first capture in the Wayback Machine: <https://web.archive.org/web/20160822035447/https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/>


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## drhowarddrfine (Sep 16, 2021)

I just received this from Amazon:


> This is the quarterly notification to inform you that AmazonSmile has made a charitable donation to the charity you’ve selected, The FreeBSD Foundation, in the amount of $809.11 as a result of qualifying purchases made by you and other customers who have selected this charity.
> 
> Thanks to customers shopping at smile.amazon.com, or with AmazonSmile ON in the Amazon Shopping app, everyday purchases have generated over $321 million in donations to charities worldwide so far.
> 
> ...


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## kpedersen (Sep 16, 2021)

Thats really cool to see. I had no idea and am going to make sure to do this in future.

I tried to boycott Amazon a while back but so many other vendors indirectly go through it anyway that at least this way money goes to something actually useful.


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## dd_ff_bb (Sep 16, 2021)

I wasn't aware of this either and i purchase almost everything from amazon. Now i'm enrolled to amazon smile.

Thanks again drhowarddrfine


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## grahamperrin@ (Sep 16, 2021)

kpedersen said:


> … I tried to boycott Amazon a while back …



Until recently I avoided Amazon. Their recent advertising campaigns pushed me over the edge, now it's pretty much a boycott.


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## gpw928 (Sep 17, 2021)

grahamperrin said:


> Until recently I avoided Amazon. Their recent advertising campaigns pushed me over the edge, now it's pretty much a boycott.


Quite a few years back the two largest supermarket chains in Australia bought out the Shell and (most of the) Caltex retail petrol stations, and offered "shopper docket" discounts on fuel.

On the basis of petrol price alone, they eventually sent most of the competing petrol stations to the wall.  Some have survived (mostly those with excellent locations).

The local Shell outlet has gone from having the cheapest petrol in the district to now routinely being the most expensive in the entire state of New South Wales...  and they are always busy.

I'm reasonably confident that Mr Bezos is planning a similar strategy.


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