> I also suggest that the list include the cumulative amount for each donor,
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> sorted so that the biggest donors are at the top.

A few of us could get started with maintaining such data, but we'd
get less othe done.  Besides all the development discussions and such
I am still falling behind by about 800-1000 emails a month because of
the release cycle.

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> Personally, it would motivate me more. I would have a feeling of control what's
> actually done with my money. If Theo somehow published some breakdown of the
> spending, even better. If he actually assigned my donation to a concrete thing
> (i. e. Packet filter development,...), that would be even better. 

I don't have a breakdown.  Some simply pays the bills.  Most pays the
hackathons. Some pays for flights.  Some stuff buys small bits of
hardware.  The sales money ensures that I don't have to go get another
job, which would leave me with way less time to deal with an increasing
developer community.

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> I would also have a motivation to compete for the topmost positions, with
> sending money as my weapon :) I could boast to my friends look I paid xxx of
> OpenBSD and I am the xth biggest donor and the packet filter you are using is
> actually paid from that.

The donation money does not pay for code that gets written.  That code
gets written because passionate people put their spare time into it.
The best money can do is help get them to conferences or hackathons,
or keep the electricity running so that there is a machine for them to
commit to.

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> People are not computers, they decide based on emotions, and if you tune the
> psychological aspect of the thing you can induce better emotions without
> actually compromising your ideology.  If other people think the same way like
> me, then Theo would start getting more donations if he changed to that system. 

Doing things takes time.  I choose not to do what you suggest, so that I have
time to do things which I think are more important to the source tree.

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> Sometimes I wonder how much money goes to paying Theo's time, how much into
> paying other people like artists, how much into buying hardware, and if
> something of that isn't actually financed in an inefficient way. If I saw the
> real numbers, these concerns would probably vanish.

I don't even have any numbers.  I could do 3 days of accounting per month
to create some numbers, but that would be 3 days wasted.