Which Free&Open-Source Projects should I Donate to?
What FOSS projects are most in need of funding? I'd like to help if I can.
I'm also looking for projects only related to FOSS, or "in-the-spirit" of FOSS.
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Pretty sure the internet archive is dealing with Petabytes, if not Exabytes.
Yea, I have terabytes of data in my closet
That's a lot of porn.
*Linux ISOs
Yeah, that's what they said.
Imagine how much the internet archive has!
there's a yo-momma joke here.
"Yo momma so old and retro she's freely available to all on archive.org"?
https://archive.org/about/
SFC ("Software Freedom Conservancy") is doing good work on a legal front that may well result in a lot more consumer electronic devices (like smart TVs) having fully FOSS OSs available.
More info at https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html
This is fascinating as I didn't even know about it for one, and for two it's based on having legal standing as a customer of the product, not the developer of the GPL code. I'll be interested to see where this goes.
For real. I've been anxiously awaiting developments, but it seems that no more developments are likely to happen until September.
Millions of people use beautifulsoup4, but most probably don’t realize that a core library that powers it, soupsieve, is effectively maintained by one person. In the spirit of the xkcd you linked, Isaac Muse could probably use some funding
Not sure if it’s directly related, but I donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). They’re quite active in the technology space and I feel that they also carry the FOSS ethos.
https://eff.org
I didn't know they take donations. Good to know.
The ones you use. If you use KDE, Thunderbird, Gimp or whatnot you should consider donating to those specifically.
Still, don't forget Wikipedia, it's one of the greatest Open Source projects of all time.
More specifically, donate to the project itself (like Krita) instead of the big KDE umbrella.
krita my beloved
One thing I found the hard way is that majority of backends for imagick, the suite that powers almost every file conversion and manipulation you see on the internet, are maintained by, at most, one person, if not abandoned completely. I'd say that'd be a good one to donate to, and from which most people would benefit from.
damn for real? With how much imagick is used I imagined it had some real backing
GraphenOS Fdroid
Signal KDE Wikipedia Open street map
I don't know if it needs funding but I think a good contender for the project referenced in the comic is NTP the Network Time Protocol. It's used in almost every computer in existence. Syncing up times over an unreliable network is an incredibly hard problem and basically only one person on the planet knows exactly how it works. And he's set to retire. Or maybe he's already retired. Been a while since I've read about that.
David Mills is dead, but there are other people.
Bash is mantained by only one guy named Chet and almost all linux devices in the world use it. https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/
Doesn’t look like there is a way to donate to him?
How to help
To be fair, he's got a day job as an IT architect in an university, so I think he's set in regards to finances. Codevelopers on the other hand, those would come handy - especially for knowledge transfer
My first thought was bash.org and I thought, "Chet needs to get his ass in gear."
I donate to the one I'm using right now: https://join-lemmy.org/donate
Same here on my instance lemmy.ca
the main dev is a transphobe, no thanks. I don't know how they expect to get donations if they say stuff like that. Perhaps donate to sunaurus instead.
Not money per se, I believe more hands are necesary to assist/succeed Werner Koch. He is doing a critical task for the internet, and last I read, he is the only one on it.
Not sure why no more upvotes, but I also feel this is a crucial one if not the most crucial one.
Maybe because he's doing ok now, getting 100k plus USD annually from a couple big-ass corporations after he struggled for 20+ years. And living in Germany, one of the best countries to be a citizen of.
I'm not saying he doesn't deserve it, he does plus back pay for all the other work.
Right, but the ask in the response is help, not money
Sure, although the response was to the question: "What FOSS projects are most in need of funding? I’d like to help if I can."
Plus, it's not easy to assist/succeed critical cryptographic development. I don't think it's something most of us can really help with.
FreeCAD!
Also KiCad
Libreboot.
I provided testing and funding (not as a developer) for computers like the 9020, 9010, 7010, and 780 OptiPlex, as well as the E4300 Latitude and T1700 Precision. All it takes is some collaboration with others in the community to make it possible!
Do you work in enterprise IT?
Sorry for the really late reply, no I am not in enterprise IT. I did this solely to help the community use Libreboot more, I want to see it become mainstream. I also was just planning on reselling most of these models, but I haven't got to it yet.
Haha, no worries, it just seemed like a who's who of retired enterprise machines!
LibreOffice or other open source office suites. Rich word processors, spreadsheet, and slideshow software are seldom thought about but extremely important in the information age, and the duopoly of Microsoft and Google would like nothing more than to see the open source alternatives die so they can take full control of your documents.
Especially if you use Linux as a daily driver: KDE, GNOME, XFCE, Lxqt, other desktop environments. Unless you know how to do everything from the command line, they're probably the things allowing you to use Linux at all. Think about how much funding Windows or Mac development gets, that's because making a full graphical shell and suite of up to date system apps is difficult as fuck and they're massive codebases that require constant maintenance. One could even argue that their development and maintenance is a bigger undertaking than the Linux kernel itself yet most Linux users never think about them, nor do they have the backing of large companies like the kernel does because pretty much all of them use Windows on their workstations even if their server infrastructure runs Linux. And high quality graphical environments are absolutely critical if we're ever to have hope of Linux being adopted by the general public and not just developers and power users. If you use Linux as your main OS and have the cash to spare, considering tossing even a quarter of the cost of a Windows license you didn't buy to your DE of choice and do your part in ensuring that DE stays usable in the future.
If all answers are "yes", donate to them.
Some ideas
Here's a few I can think of (without knowing whether or not they desperately need it):
If you have a solid torrent setup and a few hundred GBs of free space, you can support Annas Archive by seeding big chunks of the books.
Wikipedia, Tor, Archive.org
Tor its from se CIA so I think its not needed...
Don't know if my contributions are best (or can be placed under these lists) but they are ones I enjoy and appreciate
the fediverse instance that I use and want to support
Why Lemmy.ca?
Asking cause I've only really been exposed to .world and .ml and would like to know the advantages and disadvantages of switching up.
Because I'm Canadian and the instance is Canadian moderated by people in Canada who do their best to keep the service and servers as Canadian as possible. I wouldn't be surprised if the servers hosting the instance were liquid cooled with maple syrup, the racks held together with hockey sticks and hockey tape and the whole thing guarded by polar bears.
... conTINually smashed on Sortilege....
well .ml is special, most probaboy don't have a problem there but if you do you really do (ask me why the anime community on lemmy.ml is practically dead)
.world is just suffering from success, they regularly have federation troubles with other instances because they are by far the largest one and hence run into scaling troubles. Other than that it's the most reddit like moderation wise also due to being so big. It's courtesy to steer people away from .world simply to prevent the scaling problems from getting worse
OpenSSL?
Octoprint (web interface for 3d printers) is one of my favorite open source projects
https://octoprint.org/support-octoprint/
I’m glad to hear that’s still going. I used that a lot a decade ago!
That's been around for a decade?
Good lord, that makes me feel old. I used Slic3r for years until Octoprint came out.
This is literally carnap.io for formal logic teachers. Just a dude in Nebraska holding all of us up. He's not even an academic anymore!
You can donate to the general fund of Software in the Public Interest and let them figure out which of their projects (Debian is the most prominent one) needs the money most.
https://www.spi-inc.org/donations/
One advantage over Software Freedom Conservancy is that, if my memory serves, SFC criticized Richard Stallman and his appointment to the FSF board over the manufactured controversies of the last few years, SPI didn't.
Hello, you might be interested to this post I loved and enjoyed to read: https://www.arscyni.cc/file/take_my_money.html
This is an interesting approach that needs wide exposure.
Cool blog post, thanks for sharing.
There are a few nitpicks in my opinion (e.g. the uBlock Origin page hints to donate to list maintainers or at least that's the message I got, K-9 Mail has a relationship with Thunderbird Mail and so I believe donations are possible, I think rule 4 is too strict by disallowing any project where cryptocurrency donations are an option because despite its issues the main ones are legitimate ways of donating to projects without giving personal data to other corporations like PayPal/Stripe/etc.) so I would use this blog as a useful exploration rather than an ultimate who-to-donate-to guide.
I'm glad they didn't just stop at the number and went on to explore scale and that being able to donate an impactful amount for more than a few tools is a privilege. While I disagree that UBI is a realistic solution (it's a reformist coping mechanism) or that taxes are likely to go towards this kind of critical infrastructure, it's great to see the discussion was brought up and integrated, alongside critique of so-called philanthropy.
Also, I've never seen the yin-yang symbol used as a light/dark mode button, I really like that.
Proton, the Swiss based, privacy focused VPN and cloud services provider does a $10 raffle for a lifetime accounts with all proceeds and a match up to $150k to a list of ten privacy/foss focused charities & organizations. Proton isn’t itself a non profit in need of funding per say but they do good work and it’s an easy way to put a small amount towards some worthy cause, and possibly win a decent product in the process. Wont post links to avoid looking like a shill, but the list on their page for the raffle might also be a good place to look if you’re wanting to donate to something directly.
Currently ongoing until Jan 5 2024. $10 per ticket. https://shop.proton.me/products/2024-lifetime-raffle-ticket
Ty!
Guitarix! Open source project for guitar/musical instruments that acts as a modeling interface. Recently updated to include NAMs.
Who is this nebraskan that inspired this meme
The title text mentions imagemagick, there are other examples in the wiki.
Blender is looking for funding to integrate better into professional industry and provide and open source Autodesk replacement
Try Olive Editor
This one is WAY underrated. Cool! I want to try it!
true fact: Nebraska is the Heartland of the Internet.
If this is true is there any elaboration on what that exactly means? Always looking to learn haha.
just a joke
😄❤️
My vote would be for Phosh. I use it every day.
Linux mint or something like it. We need to make them better than Windows and macOS
i cant donate bcs i dont got a credit card sadly :(
This has the basic shape of a substation transformer and I'm here for it.
the one that you make money from it
we all agree about the 'free' part, right?