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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.
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
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/
Doesnβt 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."
If all answers are "yes", donate to them.
Guitarix! Open source project for guitar/musical instruments that acts as a modeling interface. Recently updated to include NAMs.
Wikipedia, Tor, Archive.org
Tor its from se CIA so I think its not needed...
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?
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 map
Octoprint (web interface for 3d printers) is one of my favorite open source projects
Iβm glad to hear thatβs 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? Iβd 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.
Some ideas
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
archive.org
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.
Millions of people use beautifulsoup4, but most probably donβt 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
Who is this nebraskan that inspired this meme
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.
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.
Not sure if itβs directly related, but I donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Theyβre quite active in the technology space and I feel that they also carry the FOSS ethos.
My vote would be for Phosh. I use it every day.
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!
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.
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.