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.
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?
There’s an npm command that lists packages that need funding
npm fund
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.
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.
*Linux ISOs
Yeah, that’s what they said.
Imagine how much the internet archive has!
there’s a yo-momma joke here.
“Yo momma so old and retro she’s freely available to all on archive.org”?
OpenSSL?
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.
I donate to the one I’m using right now: https://join-lemmy.org/donate
wikipedia
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
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.
LibreOffice. 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.
- 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.
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.
Some ideas
- Gimp
- Blender
- Godot
- Tenacity
- Inkscape
- Signal Desktop
- GrapheneOS
- LibreOffice
- KDE
- Codeberg
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
Guitarix! Open source project for guitar/musical instruments that acts as a modeling interface. Recently updated to include NAMs.
GraphenOS Fdroid
Signal KDE Wikipedia Open street mapNot 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.