I have about €10 in Proprietary software purchases, and €1500 in donations to FOSS projects.
Would you accept sloppy mouth kisses from a basset hound in the form of thanks? Because though I am not affiliated with any foss project, I am affiliated with some charitable corporations and this makes my soul happy. And my neighbor’s basset hound is really cute.
Yes I will accept kisses.
This is the way
Buying software for 10 bucks isn’t even bad. Buying a license, which can be revoked at any time, is.
I’ve given a lot more money to the Krita Foundation than any other graphics applications combined. Every time there’s an update I’m like “woaaah awesome taek mi monies!!”
I wonder how much Krita being on steam has generated alone.
donate 10 dollars, then deal with 5 years of constant email harassment for more money, despite saying they wont harass you for more money cough wikipedia cough
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Sorry what? Wikipedia is running MediaWiki, which is fully open source.
wait what
I mean, I proudly wired 100 euros to GrapheneOS simply because how awesome it is.
Insert the super fancy Tux for donating more for the FOSS than you would have paid for the proprietary software 🤴
And the mind explosion Tux for donating to a project you don’t (yet? or ever?) use but want to see developed anyway.
Hey, random question here. Is there a project or a website where you can specify your Foss projects which you want to give money to and how much and you only have one payment? In my head I think it would be cool if I could split 50 euros in percent or something like this and target my favorite 20 projects. Obviously this project or website should and must be secure and trustworthy.
I think thanks.dev can do this, it’s more designed around donating to dependencies of your own projects, but you can manually specify other projects.
This is actually a great idea, especially if it also supported recurring payments. I’ve terminated all my subscriptions to various streaming services and am planning to instead use that money for monthly donations to FOSS projects I use - such a service would help, both for payment and possibly discovering other projects I haven’t thought about that offer ways to donate!
I know this is super weird but, I kinda like seeing a buy button on stuff like “elementaryOS” or “Zorin OS”, its essentially just an donation, but I think especially for normal people its that extra “professionalism” which makes it looks like yet another “normal” OS to consider.
I donate to the most important projects out there: Servo, PostmarketOS, F-Droid, Signal (from time to time).
Wikipedia? It’s not software but worth donating to.
there’s also the Internet Archive if one’s looking for something to donate to :)
SO important. They’re always under some kind of attack, and they’re pretty much the most accessible way we have to access a web that keeps disappearing and getting replaced.
That is an excellent place to sonate, that ans FUTO.
i’m not that familiar with the matter, but iirc there were some controversies regarding FUTO (smth like claiming to sponsor some projects and using their logos without permission and just making some one-off donation)
I donated couple of times. Aren’t they doing really well financially? If they will put the big banner asking for money again I will give again :)
I’m also subscribing local newspaper even though the amount of trackers they have is ridiculous and The Guardian. Good journalism is also very important.
Wikipedia itself is doing fine but they have a bunch of super interesting side projects that they don’t advertise much, and aren’t doing as well. Wikinews, their news site is shutting down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Single/2026-03-31#News_and_notes (this is really close to april fools hopefully I didn’t eat the onion. Or hopefully I did?).
My favorite is wikibooks: http://wikibooks.org/ , which are open source texbooks that can be edited wikipedia style. Their programming one’s are really high quality. The idea behind those is that you can export a known good frozen version of them, as a texbook for a class. Related is also wikiversity, which is course curriculum. It’s similar, but different.
But they also have a travel voyage, wikivoyage, and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikimedia_sister_projects
I just need a way to spend money so the banner goes away.
What’s “Servo”? Searching all I find are, well, servos lol
New, open source rendering engine. It’s our best chance at getting multiplatform, web based apps that don’t depend on Apple or Microsoft. Hopefully also new web browser that can be an alternative to Firefox.
In case you haven’t already explored existing browser alternatives, Qutebrowser is a keyboard-driven browser that can be infinitely extended as it is written in Python and you have full access to the browser API (including the low-level internals) in your configuration file. You can import any Python modules you need, and it has native support for ad blocker lists + userscripts (Greasemonkey et al).
Alright that sounds cool!
I remember buying a CD set of FreeBSD 3.3 back in the day. Partially to support the project, and partially because the alternative was to download it over 33.6baud where I paid per minute.
in the early 00s my Dad and I bought a copy of Linux Mandrake from a Software ETC. didn’t have much of a choice in the matter as unless you were in university or something that was the only way of getting it.
Man did we fuck up the family PC trying to install that thing. Came with a massive manual and my Dad figured he could do it cause he kinda sorta not really knew DOS. me? I knew how to put ram and a cpu in a computer. we were not prepared.
Unless you were in BFE, there were options for getting Linux delivered in the mid 90s.
I know I bought a Red hat 4 (not to be confused with RHEL) CD in the late 90s from some mail order thing.
This was actually “fill out a form and mail it”. And they offered legit nearly every major distro. I think they even sold printed out copies of HOWTOs.
But it was quite cheap. Iirc it wasn’t much more than postage and a small fee to cover time and materials.
And I paid C.O.D.
This wasn’t a secret…I think I found the site either from usenet or EFnet #linux… but it wasn’t like going to CompUSA.
I also remember seeing Walnut Creek FreeBSD and Slackware CDs at a nearby flea market (Flea@MIT) around then, too. Probably also the computer fairs as well.
In Sweden there were computer magazines that came with a CD-ROM that had at least one new Linux distro on it with every issue. I had so much fun trying them all out on my computer and noting down what I liked the best with each of them.
Sometimes when I was home alone for an extended period of time, I used to install a distro on the shared family computer as well, to use as a router and have the feeling of running a real server (so far I had only experienced UNIX/Linux servers via restricted shells on public services over dialup, but never as root…).
Before the family returned home I would reinstall Windows 95 and they would be none the wiser. At least I think so…
Made my first round of donations to FOSS projects last weekend!
Support the people doing the work that benefits you.
I have nothing against paying for quality software even if it’s not open-source. I pay for Plex, Symfonium (Android) and Kagi. What I hate is yet another subscription for terribly software.
Buying
$10$1000 Proprietary SoftwareDonating $10 to FOSS SoftwareSubscribing to the FOSS Software Patron Tier for $10/moI try and donate where I can, but stuff like Signal, that refuses to employ engineers outside of the US because “talent doesn’t exist anywhere else” is where I draw the line. Yes, opensource donations are amazing, but not for projects with attitudes like that.
No-one deserves your donations, but that sounds like you’re letting perfect get in the way of good. There are tons of things that speak for Signal. They made the whisper protocol and they consistently protect privacy where they can. I’ve used it for years (meaning I’ve actively generated costs for them without any revenue), and that qualifies as good for me.
There is no such thing as the Whisper protocol, AFAIK.
Signal uses the Signal protocol, formerly known as TextSecure due to Signal being a merge of the earlier (proprietary) projects TextSecure for encrypted messaging and RedPhone for encrypted voice calls.
The two projects were initially started by Whisper Systems, co-founded by Moxie Marlinspike and Stuart Anderson. The name of this company may be the cause of confusion, but the protocol has to my knowledge never been called anything else than TextSecure and subsequently Signal.
Whisper Systems was acqui-hired by Twitter who then open-sourced both projects under the GPL license, after which the Open Whisper Systems organization was created by Moxie to continue development on what later got merged into the Signal project as we see it today.
The protocol uses the Double Ratchet algorithm (a.k.a. Axolotl Ratchet) for cryptographic key exchange, invented specifically for secure messaging and use in Signal (although naturally open source and applicable for oher use cases too).
Wikipedia (understandably) has a nice timeline over the various projects:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3ASignal_timeline.svg
End of nerd snipe transmission, over and out. :-)
I donate at least 1k a year to opensource. There is no shortage of good opensource projects deserving donations; good in the sense of quality and those that fit into my worldview.
I’m a fierce believer in remunerating opensource and of way stronger political opinions. What I won’t donate to, is this idea that the US is the only place on the planet where skilled workers exist that can do this type of work. Orgs believing in US execeptionalism are great. Go be exceptional, just without my money. They won’t miss it.
Whoa, that’s so toxic. I’m glad I switched my donation to Delta. Plus it just feels so much better to use.
I don’t have evidence for this but Signal feels just like an app right before it’s sold off to a megacorp. I can’t put my finger on it…
Is that really the case? I work for a multi national FLOSS organisation but every additional country you want to hire from requires additional compliance overhead so in practice we generally hire from countries where we already have the legal setup to employee people.
How big an org is Signal?
I’d have to find their blog post again where they reveal their financials. IIRC it was 50 staff and each was earning half a million or something on average. Maybe I read or remember it wrong but the blog post or comments by Signal staff (maybe even the CEO?) were quite elitist regarding their reasons for hiring US staff or staff living in the US only.
What the true reasons are I dont know. Maybe indeed multinational hiring is just too complicated, who knows, but the way the responses were worded were maybe unfortunate, but at revealing for me.
That’s a strange way to say that you just made everything up in your previous post.
yeah you really have to be careful sometimes when you want to donate within the FOSS community. Like Hyprland or Kitty. I wouldn’t give those dudes a dime.
Template for those that want it.
Thanks!
