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.
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.
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.
- Are they useful and/or essential for you/your causes?
- Is their funding model transparent?
- Do they need more funds to hit their financial goal for sustaining themselves?
If all answers are “yes”, donate to them.
It was just attacked by hackers a few months ago, no to mention all the lawsuits they’ve been getting, and cost of maintenance of TERABYTES of data. They really need the funding to survive.
Edit: Missed the FOSS part, but still, its worth mentioning. archive.org is not an open source software, but they are a non-profit doing something that benefits all of us. And they are transparent about how they operate. More like a “Free and Transparent Community Service”, rather than “FOSS”. And not to mention, the many FOSS software they could preserve in case they stop getting maintained, so they could get picked up later, and not be forever lost. It goes hand-in-hand with the philosophy of FOSS: benefiting society.
Pretty sure the internet archive is dealing with Petabytes, if not Exabytes.
A single copy of the Internet Archive library collection occupies 145+ Petabytes of server space – and we store at least 2 copies of everything).
Yea, I have terabytes of data in my closet
That’s a lot of porn.
there’s a yo-momma joke here.
“Yo momma so old and retro she’s freely available to all on archive.org”?
GraphenOS Fdroid
Signal KDE Wikipedia Open street mapOne 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
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!
FreeCAD!
Also KiCad
Here’s a few I can think of (without knowing whether or not they desperately need it):
- Debian
- Arch Linux
- Anna’s Archive
- FSF
- Libreboot
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.
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
Hello, you might be interested to this post I loved and enjoyed to read: https://www.arscyni.cc/file/take_my_money.html
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.
wikipedia
brings massive amounts of information to the public, worldwide, in almost every language, for free without advertisements
They have massive funds, a few years ago I researched both the worldwide and (my) national wiki foundation. Very transparent. So just don’t expect your money going to the text based wiki (which is smaller than a TB btw).
They will probably invest in wiki related projects like wikimedia, wiktionary and so on.
A rambling piece that boils down to a poorly substantiated opinion.
Namely, the author is under the impression that the wikimedia foundation spends unnecessarily and that, because they raised more than they spend, they should reword their requests for donations.
I half agree with the last point although the author doesn’t seem to understand that a couple of tens of millions is not a lot of money for a foundation of wikimedia’s calibre.
As for the first point: the author simply assumes that the spending is unnecessary. This is at best substantiated with other people’s opinions. If the author had presented actual detail on the expenditures, they could’ve made an actual case. However, the absence of such detail gives off the impression that there is no real substance to this criticism
Who is this nebraskan that inspired this meme
The title text mentions imagemagick, there are other examples in the wiki.
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
Where will the funds go?
Proceeds will go to 10 organizations selected with the support of our community and to a handful of past fundraisers beneficiaries, with Proton matching up to $150,000 in donations. The new recipients this year are:
- Freedom House
- Free Software Foundation Europe
- OpenStreetMap
- The Tech Oversight Project
- Ladybird Browser
- Nothing2hide
- Open Data Institute
- Ada Lovelace Institute
- Law for Change
- Free Press Unlimited
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.
