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.
Linux mint or something like it. We need to make them better than Windows and macOS
The Perl and Raku Foundation has seen a big drop in funding over the last decade
Understanding the Financials of The Perl and Raku Foundation
Try Olive Editor
This one is WAY underrated. Cool! I want to try it!
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?
My first thought was bash.org and I thought, “Chet needs to get his ass in gear.”
- 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.
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?
Guitarix! Open source project for guitar/musical instruments that acts as a modeling interface. Recently updated to include NAMs.
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.
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
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
GraphenOS Fdroid
Signal KDE Wikipedia Open street mapOctoprint (web interface for 3d printers) is one of my favorite open source projects
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yea, I have terabytes of data in my closet
That’s a lot of porn.
Imagine how much the internet archive has!
*Linux ISOs
Yeah, that’s what they said.
there’s a yo-momma joke here.
“Yo momma so old and retro she’s freely available to all on archive.org”?
