Mitchell 
Very cool.
Mitchell truly is one of the good ones.
As Zig users, we are blessed by his shared love of the language and generosity.
So a semi retired guy who only uses this programming language to write a terminal emulator donates high 6 digits to this project, while has different opinions than this project’s culture and policies.
I guess this explains a lot.
Tbf, “a semi-retired billionaire guy” - before Ghostty he created that little known tool called Terraform 
That’s really generous!
I also like reading his thoughtful content, especially on AI psychosis. Explaining how he’s not anti-AI, but definitely wants to put things in perspective and not drink the kool-aid wholesale. I appreciate that.
To be honest, I’ve mixed feelings regarding such a proclamation.
Of course, donating money to Zig (or any truly FOSS project) is really great! A bigger financial scope always helps, I guess.
However, why always self-advertising these kind of moves that could be simply and silently altruistic. I bet many of us also donate money to some FOSS projects, if they can afford. But almost nobody is talking about it. And while 400k sounds very much in the first place (because it is for ordinary mortals), its very likely a (much?) smaller percentage of his total fortune than many others of the community are donating…
To make it clear again, I’m totally NOT against such donations. Its only the public advertising I’m not really comfortable with. But thats solely my personal opinion. And I see some harsh objection incoming 
Looks like his opinion helped the forum not throw away all AI users
I understand how virtue signaling can be off putting. But in that case, it also serves as public endorsement from a major FOSS figure, which is IMHO a positive thing for zig.
edit : not that zsf absolutely needs that kind of rep boost, because their actions speak for themselves
If I donated the same relative amount it would probably be around $2.
The donation is great for Zig of course, but billionaires should not exist at all, imo.
That said: I will soon donate a much much bigger relative amount 
Mitchell being vocal about his donation is not done for self-advertisement purposes. It’s meant to be a way to show to potential adopters that Zig Software Foundation is receiving serious amounts of money to continue operating, and that it doesn’t risk closing down tomorrow because of lack of funding.
In doing so (vocally endorsing Zig) Mitchell is not only giving us the money, but also “staking” his name in support of what we’re doing.
I’ve seen plenty of comments over time about how for Zig to succeed the only viable path is to get acquired by a big tech company, and that without the financial muscle of one no technology could ever gain the critical mass necessary to see wider adoption in the industry.
I can promise you that C-levels are thinking about it the same way. To them risk is a major axis to which evaluate everything related to the business, and Zig definitely presents itself as a riskier option than most other languages. Mitchell’s communication is meant to help Zig seem less risky.
As for the amount, not donating massive amounts of money all at once is indubitably the right choice.
If he were to donate, say, 10 million dollars all at once, we wouldn’t be able to use all the money right away because we have to work under the assumption that the donation is not guaranteed to be repeated / we don’t want to have to agree to things that we don’t want to do in order to keep receiving a donation.
And on the other hand, if he donates all that money at once and then something goes horribly wrong (e.g. we let Amazon into our board of directors) then all that money will be lost because he won’t be able to take it back. By keeping the donation (comparably) small, he can be confident that he is putting his money into a cause that he believes in and, if something bad happens, he can divert that money to a more deserving non-profit instead of having to watch some Amazon plant roll in that money like a pig in manure.
All in all this is a pretty cool arrangement and I recommend not being blind to these strategical aspects, because they do make a difference :^)
I totally get most of the positive aspects if someone like Mitchell Hashimoto publicy endorsing Zig; strengthening the project, creating kind of stability etc. I also understand the advantages of donating in not too big chunks to keep it valuable over time.
I’m just not comfortable with the heading and the first paragraph of the linked article. Why calling the currently donated sum and the total? Just naming the post “We/I support the Zig Software Foundation” would also be very good advertisement by a well-known tech person. If some members of the community would write posts “Pledging Another $15 to the Zig Software Foundation” every time they donate and then summing up “now $45 in total”, most would find it kind of strange, I bet.
Of course, the problem is very likely not with Mitchell Hashimoto as an individual person (I don’t know him), but with these habits in our societies…
Thats the point I don’t like about the system and the always present self-advertising of those rich people, and its very unappealing. But thats how it is today, I know… I just wanted to express my feelings about these circumstances, but maybe too off-topic. I will stay away from more comments.
I don’t want to weight in on if Hashimoto is donating enough or not enough; I honestly don’t think we have enough information to cast that judgement. But I think a “putting some money where your mouth is” is valuable. And if he did it silently, it wouldn’t have the impact on the zig ecosystem that doing it publicly would do. For example, after I read it, I bumped up my personal donations a little bit. It also helps counter the other headlines for non-ziggit people about Bun.
I hate that everything in open source has devolved to this corporate, market based thinking instead of valuing things based on their own value.
Mitchell donating isn’t gonna help make Zig more appealing to anyone other than investors because any engineer will look at the dozens of open source zig projects that have since become unmaintained and unusable without significant rework or all the existing commercial Zig projects and see that they remain stuck on 0.14, if not 0.13, because there is absolutely no stability anywhere in the project and updating is not worth the effort or money.
I also find it really hypocritical that he is “frustrated” with the negative impact of AI on Open Source while he himself is using and promoting it, only doing further harm.
wow, that’s awesome! i might make a short little video about it on my page. i did a previous video about his love for github on his website or something haha. some big bucks!
I think Zig is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. One of their mission and vision is to educate people and help people to learn computers. It’s on their papers. And it’s required by law. If they don’t do that, they will not be allowed to exist, or they have to change their registration to another organization structure. So in terms of this, any donations are appreciated, because they won’t affect the route, policies, and culture of the organization.
Even if commercial projects stay in older versions, and even if the billionaire doesn’t fully agree with the organization, they still can donate, and they still can be appreciated by us. I don’t have any problem with that. I don’t hate them.
Also because of the mission and vision, Zig has to continually seeking better ways to interact with the system levels and computer hardware. This is why the current versions ignite a lot of debates. They can’t just simply encourage everyone to create a lot of “crates” or “packages” or something like that which are bindings, wrappings, and then to claim that they are “safe”; they are “stable”; they are “commercial ready”; and they have a mature “ecosystem”. Zig cannot just do that because they are easier to be commercial ready, since this is not helpful for education. They have to follow to their 501(c)(3) mission and vision.
And talking about mission and vision, if any commercial companies or billionaires think that they are good for the society, they will donate them. This is also called corporate social responsibility. In corporate and financial sectors, they assume a thing called “Going concern principle”. That means that they have to make sure in a foreseeable the companies will keep going. For this, they want to make sure their current projects will keep working, and they also want to ensure a better future for potential social and generation changes. This is why companies do donation.
So basically, I wouldn’t be against people and companies’ donation because they have different mission and vision than what the organization has. I would say they eventually will have to face some shared future and will cross the paths.
The fact that this discussion regarding someone generously donating a large sum has angled towards whether or not billionaires should exist, how much it is relative to his total wealth in the context of determining if it was truly altruistic, or questioning the motives of his heart because he announced it publicly is just… next level.
I am not going to argue over it, but that is absolutely shameful, I feel embarrassed just for having read it.
I think this comment from Mitchel himself on HN is relevant:
I’m no longer a billionaire, partially because I paid an astronomical amount in taxes (I don’t play the tax avoidance games). And partially because we’re donating a whole lot more than $400K per year. This is ONE donation. We don’t publicize most of our giving because it attracts armchair critics like you, and its distracting from the goals.
(I make an exception for Zig and technical things because my influence for better and worse usually is net positive for the initiative)
Yea I also agree with this. I think this is objectively a good thing and I’m happy Mitchell publicly stated it. Zig is a really cool and amazing project and I’ve been loving the language and donated over the last few years (since 0.11.0 IIRC), I have personally experienced the joy of using Zig. I’m sure Mitchell as a skilled engineer is also feeling something similar to me so I can relate. This means that I do believe he is donating because he genuinely loves the project, as an engineer, it has nothing to do with money. If I was rich I would also want to donate to something I believed in as well.