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.
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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”?
A single copy of the Internet Archive library collection occupies 145+ Petabytes of server space – and we store at least 2 copies of everything).
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.
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
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
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
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.
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?
To be fair, he’s got a day job as an IT architect in an university, so I think he’s set in regards to finances. Codevelopers on the other hand, those would come handy - especially for knowledge transfer
My first thought was bash.org and I thought, “Chet needs to get his ass in gear.”
GraphenOS Fdroid
Signal KDE Wikipedia Open street mapI 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
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.
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?
Sorry for the really late reply, no I am not in enterprise IT. I did this solely to help the community use Libreboot more, I want to see it become mainstream. I also was just planning on reselling most of these models, but I haven’t got to it yet.
Haha, no worries, it just seemed like a who’s who of retired enterprise machines!
FreeCAD!
Also KiCad
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
