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.
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
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.
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.
I donate to the one I’m using right now: https://join-lemmy.org/donate
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!
Some ideas
- Gimp
- Blender
- Godot
- Tenacity
- Inkscape
- Signal Desktop
- GrapheneOS
- LibreOffice
- KDE
- Codeberg
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.
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.
Wikipedia, Tor, Archive.org
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
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!
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.
Blender is looking for funding to integrate better into professional industry and provide and open source Autodesk replacement
Try Olive Editor
