Traditionally, advertising your charitable contributions might be seen as distasteful virtue signalling for which one has already earned their reward. However, I think in the cultural context of digital initiatives, it’s actually helpful and quite important to show off what you have been donating to, it is a much stronger signal to draw people’s attention to important projects by word of mouth.
Thus, this thread is intended to be a celebration of your personal contributions to initiatives towards digital freedom.
Think of it as an “MyAnimeList for donations”, or a “Goodreads for open projects”, list out which projects you personally have your sights on you think are important that other people also hear about.
Examples:
- the Blender project: a lifeline to rescue creative professionals from the clutches of artistic bear-bile farms
- neocities: promoting a return to wholesome hand-reared digital gardens
- Internet Archive and Wikipedia foundation: for keeping library of Alexandria of collective human memories and knowledge
- codeberg: provides a safe haven for open source development from being confined to a life inside factory farms.
https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-report...
I've been a product management lead for 2 commercial open-core companies and people drastically overestimate:
- How much code the community contributes (in both cases, >95% of all code was written by employees hired by the commercial company) - How few commercial resources are needed to support the community (running forums, answering GitHub tickets, etc) - How much financial support is actually forthcoming when there's not some "locked commercial features"
As the paper points out, many of these widely used commercial projects receive a few hundred thousand dollars at most in donations (often much less) but need to employ more developers than that financing can support to maintain a baseline capability to address basic bug fixes (including security fixes) once they become "popular enough" to be known by the masses.
Meanwhile, I would consider doing actual work for software projects that were just a couple people and a mission.
Immediately think of Arrested Development: "It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?"
For those that are pressed for time, there is a good Executive Summary on page 8 of the linked PDF report:
https://www.fordfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/ro...
DownThemAll, a browser extension that makes multiple simultaneous downloads from a page easy: https://www.downthemall.org/howto/donate/
Free Software Foundation (FSF): https://www.fsf.org/about/ways-to-donate
LibreOffice: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/
Mozilla Thunderbird: https://give.thunderbird.net/
Soundswitch (Windows application to switch default playback devices and/or recording devices using simple hotkeys): https://soundswitch.aaflalo.me/
Tab Session Manager browser extension: https://tab-session-manager.sienori.com/
Tor Project: https://donate.torproject.org/
VLC media player: https://www.videolan.org/contribute.html
If you had asked me, I would have said with confidence "that no longer exists, modern browsers have had this feature one click away for years". But I suppose the truth is they don't, and I just haven't had a reason to use this in a long time.
The main feature I use it for is queueing multiple downloads, which I don't believe either chrome or firefox offers out of the box.
Highly useful when downloading from archive.org or other sites which block multiple concurrent downloads.
Seems way less suspicious than jdownloader to me.
At this point I plan to donate to Ladybird instead. Excited for that project.
Hence the allocation of that “other income” is still very much a related concern, but with just enough indirection that Mozilla can evade scrutiny of it when it comes to executive pay.
To me it just somewhat communicates a kind-of bad faith in company spending priorities and demonstrates that my donations might have greater impact elsewhere. That’s all.
Not aware of their org's other works, but I feel like their most popular product (VLC media player) could be improved. Rather than offloading work to plugin devs (surely less than 1% of users use non-default plugins anyway), they could add features to the core app. I'd like to have dual subtitles with different languages for example.
Most of us live a busy life, and it's usually hard to stop for a moment and think of the many things around us that make living better, even if it's a tiny open source project that solves a little, almost unknown, problem, run by some random guy in Hungary or Minnesota or Sicily.
I'd bet that a fair number of us on HN have some form of disposable assets / money, and that a small donation will not ruin our lives. Some of us might have an even larger capacity to donate. It's nice when we find the time to appreciate something, and decide to support it at least with our money, if not with a bit of our time and effort.
Side note: I am worried about robots, and am actively looking for a project that could make robot OS or components or the AI/brain that drives them, more human and less harmful. If you know anything worth exploring, please share.
If you are more keen about the hardware side (imo this side probably require more funding if you really want to keep Robots OS, software can come later) I like Robot Studios work by Rob Knight [2], it's OS afaik, with projects such as DexHand [3]. Recently someone posted K-scale labs [4] as robot OS, but imo looks more like a well-funded SV startup that will go full OpenAI and close everything off as soon they hit R&D traction. (just my own impression from reading their docs & focus, happy to be proven wrong)
[1] https://www.openrobotics.org/
[2] https://www.therobotstudio.com/
[3] https://www.dexhand.org/
[4] https://www.kscale.dev/
It's one of the few open source projects (besides Blender and GIMP) that is used directly by non-technical end-users and that has managed to surpass its commercial brethren , both in features and popularity. This is partly due to its extreme, almost Emacs-like hackability and a vibrant plugin ecosystem, which provides everything from better speech synthesizers to accessibility enhancements for other apps.
It has been created by two guys in Australia, mostly in response to the outrageous prices of commercial screen readers (~$1500 for noncommercial use). The situation has gotten better since then, Windows now comes with Narrator, which is... usable, but NVDA is still the top contender for most (non-enterprise) use cases.
[1] https://www.nvaccess.org/support-us/
Since when has GIMP surpassed its commercial brethren?
https://u24.gov.ua/
https://savelife.in.ua/en/
https://www.razomforukraine.org/
I bought a hoody with a Tryzub on it. Hoping to buy more stuff soon.
Wikipedia has a ton of money and for a few decades doesn't really need any donations.
More info here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
Are you speaking about Open Technology Fund? AFAIK they've contributed just 3mil, while Signal costs ~40mil a year.
Drones for Ukraine https://www.dronynemesis.cz/en
I like the subscription concept here - monthly donations, set to stop the moment Ukraine wins. Because they need our help continuously, not just after a particularly bloody episode makes the news.
It's ran by ziedot.lv - the organisation that handles most of charitable donations in Latvia.
https://liberapay.com/F-Droid-Data/donate
https://blog.darkmere.gen.nz/2024/12/donations-2024/
Projects I'm donating to (not every year):
I used to donate to Software in the Public Interest, The Software Freedom Conservancy and LibreOffice but they use Paypal which is blocking charity donations from Asia/Pacific. The loss of the first two is annoying since it was easier to donate to them than multiple projects.Open Source and Internet
Humanity [It's saddening that I have to add, perhaps open source software is not as urgent this year compared to stopping the bombing and killing of children, so consider how to distribute between these categories.]I have a really hard time with this one. Their current legal situation didn't just happen to them: they made an intentional choice to do something which ~everyone who knew anything about law warned them would be catastrophic and are now facing the catastrophe that they were warned about. They acted like a small activist group with nothing to lose rather than the essential piece of infrastructure that they have become.
I appreciate that the Internet Archive only exists because it took legal risks back in the day and those risks paid off. But from a strategic perspective you really have to stop being an activist organization once you've won enough ground that being ground to a pulp by the establishment would be a catastrophic loss for humanity. At that point it's time to let the little guys with nothing to lose take the mantle and just focus on preserving the ground that you've won.
In the startup space it's common for a founder to, after a successful launch, hand off control of the organization to someone else who's better equipped to drive the company in slow and steady mode. If the people in charge of the Internet Archive feel like they're best equipped to be revolutionaries rather than maintaining the ground they won in the past, maybe it's time for them to transition into a new organization and hand off the IA to people who are able to run it in maintenance mode.
Now that's sad, I hope they learned their lesson, and I think we should all step up to help defend them. Aside from donations, I think people should be making a large amount of noise at their elected representatives to start reforming the ridiculous IP framework in the United States. The whole point of copyright and other protections was to ensure that there was some incentive to people to produce content and be able to monetize it. I think it's ludicrous to suggest that you need such an utterly long period with a shark full of teeth to go after people in order to incentivize the producing of content.
In the past I contributed to rust-analyzer - not much but something huge but at least something.
Nowadays I only contribute to https://quran.com.
Apologies if this ain't clear but I'll give it a shot.
I will donate to anyone, be it a group or one person if they can get all the different ways of reading رواية The Quran:
1. In static digital version, i.e., as PDFs or what have you in the Saudi script. 2. All the Quran's should be colour coded, i.e., tawjeed style mushaf. 3. It should be available online at first then to Android, etc. 4. Along with the Qur'an there should be readings of that style رواية in application. Shaykh Mishary is doing this but I'm quite why he doesn't just release his entire recording out all at once on YouTube.
I just what to say this isn't an easy tasks hence why I haven't attempted doing it. Or I can simply build a well and retire with life.
If something ain't clear let me know.
Regards, - Bana
They might not be popular to use, but the absolute freedom of the software along with how simple it is written makes it an incredible “good” for studying OS design.
I have also donated to the FSFE (European FSF) and the Linux foundation, but we don’t get tax incentives for donating to charity in most european countries. So it’s quite costly.
Instead I donate to FreeBSD and support OpenBSD in an ancillary way through OpenBSD Amsterdam [2]. Which yes, is also not tax exempt, but does comes with nice OpenBSD VM.
1. https://www.openbsd.org/want.html
2. https://openbsd.amsterdam/
It was my main learning resource when I was changing careers to become a software developer 8 years ago. It was a very successful career change, both financially and in regards to my satisfaction with my profession.
On a time when expensive courses and bootcamps were all the range, I feel like I wouldn’t have much better than this free resource. Thanks freeCodeCamp!
https://newpipe.net/donate/
At the risk of being downvoted for having an unpopular opinion: but if circumventing ads is your goal, then just get Youtube Premium in instead of paying for piracy.
Because contrary to popular belief, the majority of that subscription fee is actually distributed amongst the content creators that you watch. And for the majority of genres this pays the creator more than regular ad-revenue.
I don't buy merchandise because I don't like waste, so apart from direct donations (PayPal/Patreon), Youtube Premium is my preferred way of contributing my favorite content creators.
LTT actually did a good job explaining this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDsJJRNXjYI
I am not paying for piracy, I am paying for an app that makes YT experience somewhat bearable, and lack of ads is only one aspect of it.
If you want to support your favorite creators, do it through different channels than by feeding the corporate beast.
Meanwhile publishers are caught between these dueling retards and getting squeezed on both ends. Don't forget the scrapers that will hammer your server until it's offline while swapping IPv6s the entire time
"Why isn't anyone building anything anymore durrhurr???"
Well it's because:
A) Google B) You
- Internet Archive
- Wikipedia
- Bandcamp - a bit off-topic but the music industry has become an exponentially distributed winner-takes-all game. I resist by buying underground music on Bandcamp - it's an exemplary web platform, gives generous cuts to the artist, and you own the files. Even if I only listen to the song a couple times it feels good knowing 80% of the money is going straight to talented artists and 20% is going to a beacon of hope on the internet. Money spent on Bandcamp feels good.
They also have Bandcamp Fridays, usually once a month, where 100% of the proceeds go to the artists (granted, there are a lot of labels on BC these days too, but still seems to be underground music in my experience).
My being able to run Linux in a corporate environment doesn’t function well without LibreOffice (even with office 365 online being more prevenlent). Plus it’s a champ at handling csv files.
1) Debian: https://www.debian.org/donations
2) Anubis: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/funding/
You can offer your time, coding skills, feedback, design expertise, or simply help by spreading the word. In a world overflowing with information, visibility is a valuable form of support.
Choosing to boycott what doesn't align with your values is often underappreciated but can be very impactful.
Personally, I prefer to reshare and promote the projects I believe in. It's not about financial contributions—it's about increasing their reach. Sometimes, that's what makes the most significant impact.
Here are a few projects worth highlighting: Monero, ProtonMail, Briar.
I somehow feel very motivated to make sure that the intellectual works that inspired the Renaissance, European Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution are accessible, both to people and for LLM pretraining.
I still don't understand why is making LineageOS compatible with more phone models so hard compared to Linux distros in desktop, so I really appreciate all the work behind it.
When doing this it is important to communicate clearly if these are one-off contributions or if the projects can expect an annual contribution. Sadly, I didn't trust the bean counters at my employer, so I made it clear that "these are one off contributions - do not plan for future contributions from XYZ Corp". Still we managed to contribute for a handful of years.
(They stopped contributing after I left the company. Actually, the entire division, bean counters and all, was scrapped. And sadly, they did not communicate that they would stop funding these projects. This is unfortunate)
Sioyek - PDF reader. I was happy to find it when it was still very new, and being among the firsts to donate to it. Pretty wholesome to see many have donated, a bit like seeing your favorite indie-band going big. https://sioyek.info/
- PHP Foundation.
- Drupal Association - I started my career with Drupal. Although I rarely use Drupal anymore, it feels right.
I wish I could donate to uBlock Origin, but the developer doesn't seem to accept donations last time I checked.
I think the Open Street Map is also well worth donating, I'm going to pretty soon.
I consider this indispensable software, an absolute requirement for using the web today.
This seems to be the case, and is probably frankly the smart way to go. I imagine if he started pulling in thousands of dollars, he'd get much more attention from the ad industry
I can count on three fingers the end-user software products that have changed my life. Linux, VIM, and Anki. They are built on shoulders of technology, but those are the three that I touch.
immich: https://immich.app/
beszel: https://github.com/henrygd/beszel
- Octoprint
- Grayjay/Futo
- Internet Archive
- Opensubtitles
- The Guardian
I used to donate to Wikipedia, but for various reasons switched that donation to IA.
- Internet Archive, for the same reasons you do.
- LetsEncrypt, because I get a lot out of https
- Ironclad because I want to see more diverse monolithic OS kernels
- Alire because Ada's ecosystem is important to me
- Magit, needs no introduction
- Borkdude, a __massive__ Clojure ecosystem contributor
- JPMonettas, for their work on FlowStorm, an incredibly useful debugger/introspection tool for Clojure
- The CIDER project, Clojure once again
- NoahTheDuke, for their work on keeping my much beloved jinteki.net alive and we'll
All these people deserve your money imo
https://magit.vc/donate/
One of the best and widely-supported custom Android ROMs. Has a few features on top of Lineage OS and even GPay works out of the box on a rooted Pixel phone.
[1] https://hackerspaces.org
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
We support over 60 projects in areas such as media bias, algorithmic/AI bias, protest tech, and boycotting, which are pushing back against these initiatives. Donations are very much appreciated
https://techforpalestine.org/donate/
Haiku (because I was a first day BeOS user and I still miss that OS every day)
KDE (Daily driver and boy do I hate using Gnome)
Keepass2Android (essential, use it 20x per day)
Bottles (most robust and easy to use way to run windows games on my Linux box for me)
- Other projects:
Wikipedia (I'm don't 100% align with some of the politics internally and externally, as well as their spending on sidehustles, but regardless there's just no substitute)
ScreenScraper.fr (because I like neatly organized retro games)
- Today I learned:
Thunderbird donating to thunderbird only supports Thunderbird, so I'll start.
Internet Archive Even though some of the stuff they are doing is legally dubious, in general I'd say the initiative is a force for good. Considering support.
- What I wish I was able to support:
OpenSUSE I use this distro every day, but I don't have the time to invest in the community other than some well written bug reports and packaging feedback every now and then.
Firefox and MDN docs Oh boy do I have zero trust in Mozilla as an organisation, but the browser and the MDN docs are so fundamentally important to me. Regardless, I just can't bring myself to support the organisation with the current CEO.
I don’t always agree with them, but I feel like I’m strengthening the counter-side.
IMHO your money is better spent elsewhere if you want to counter the current political atmosphere. Grassroots organisations and your local political parties are more worthy of your money than some big media outlets that are for the most part "bought" by the big fish.
- Free Software Foundation (FSF): https://www.fsf.org/about/ways-to-donate
- LibreOffice: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/
[0]https://join-lemmy.org/
[1]https://spritely.institute/
[2]https://asahilinux.org/
The fastest GNU/Linux distribution available. Amazing set of patches, optimizations and specific device fixes. The community regularly finds performance regressions in the latest versions of packages and reports them upstream. Remember the NVIDIA explicit sync flickering issues? CachyOS had pushed the fixed driver before anyone else.
INaturalist, an incredible (community-driven) source of ecology information across the world, tools for identifying organisms, etc.
https://www.keybr.com - shows ads if you want to use it for free or you can pay a small fee to remove ads. The code is open-sourced so you can make your own. Helped me get the hang of split keyboards and was money well spent to support.
https://enso.sonnet.io - ingenious idea that has helped me write without loosing focus editing myself. The solo developer guy shares an entertaining blog full of illustrations and rich content. his project is available to download in full from Gumroad for a small one time fee.
If there’s any projects you know of like these please share them!
- Homebrew (I mean, I use it multiple times daily…)
- Servo (long-term health of the web)
- Mastodon and the instance I use (if you pay you’re not the product)
- Servo: Because I think browser engines are critical infrastructure for the web, and we are in dire need of one that is easily maintained, secure, embeddable, and isn't beholden to Google.
- Signal Foundation: Because our chat platforms and governments are spying on us, and Signal offers an alternative.
https://github.com/gleam-lang/
I'd like to donate to FreeCAD at some point, but the last time I had spare money to do that, I ended up paralyzed trying to figure out what would be the most impactful way to do so. Then Ondsel came and made a subscription the obvious choice (I thought) then they went away.
Ones that I probably should donate to but just haven't gotten to: Inkscape Gimp uv/ruff/ty
There are probably many more. My goal is to at least donate to any project that I make money from, preferably in a similar amount to what I might be paying otherwise. That is an awful lot to track down though, considering how many pieces there are for doing software development. Thus, I've been more focused on media and other engineering tools.
The other worse offender is projects like MinIO that removed over 100k lines, to push everyone towards "Pro" which costs 75 thousand a year. What? You had it in the previous version, 100% for free.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44095612
Now for free stuff, they have to pay by donations, if they use Roundcube for email, there goes a shekel or two, if they use Linux, gotta pay up, wordpress? Yup, drama notwithstanding, here's a buck.
It may seem like a disadvantage commercially, but I have faith that having a direct line with these guys and growing a sponsor reputation with upstream projects will pay off in the future.
Now I'm working with a client who had a website that was dead, so her graphic assets pointed to a dead site which was not bueno. I used Internet Archive to help revive the site, so they're gonna have a 'tip' coming their way. Everything has its price and its worth!
Edit: Come to think of it, these are all projects that ask for money, but not often enough to be annoying. I bet I'd donate to KDE (or Gnome or NixOS) if I'd ever get a notification and it's a 1 min click-click-click experience.
[1]: https://pointieststick.com/2024/08/28/asking-for-donations-i... [2]: https://pointieststick.com/2024/12/02/i-think-the-donation-n... [3]: https://kde.org/donate/
1. https://publicknowledge.org/about-us/
However, there are also some local (German in my case) organizations I have donated to.
1. GFF - Gesellschaft für Freiheit (anti surveillance and pro digital civil rights in the EU and Germany) [1]
2. Frag den Staat (platform enabling easy freedom of information requests in Germany and their publishing in addition to related digital civil rights activities) [2]
[1] https://freiheitsrechte.org/en/ [2] https://fragdenstaat.de/ (German only)
Usually I pick the way I want to spend money at the moment and give them to someone who satisfies the criteria.
- https://archive.org
- http://wikipedia.org
• Internet Archive
• Local libraries
Projects I wish I could donate to:
• uBlock Origin
Projects
- Thunderbird (daily driver in my job)
- Debian (also daily driver in my job)
- FreeBSD (daily driver)
- LadyBird Browser (first "real new" browser since ~20 years, privacy first, open source)
Lobbies / Organisations
- The Chaos Computer Club (CCC): Advocate digital rights, Public Awareness and Education, Legal and Ethical Guidance (Advantage: Network, Learning, Nice People)
- Any political part you like: ... (Network, Learning, Nice People)
- The Zentrum für Politische Schönheit (Center for Political Beauty): Human Rights Advocacy etc.
And I go to Conferences and Meetups and pay for it (also when they are free, since i have some money)
Before also:
- FSF
- EFF
- Tor
- Firefox
My other donations go out monthly to Internet Archive, EFF, and Thunderbird.
There for a while, The TOR Project had a thing where I could contribute by running (paying for) a node on a hosting provider (I think it might have been AWS?). That effort died on the vine and was shut down.
For content creators, I donate to Phoronix.
Anki/AnkiDroid Firefox Futo keyboard Espanso Expandroid Tubular NewPipe SponsorBlock Zen browser Freetube Linux Mint VLC LibreOffice
With that said we are looking at a new corporate structure for my business to increase the way we give back
https://github.com/immich-app
FreeFileSync, an excellent file sync utility within a network.
https://freefilesync.org/
StemRoller, separate stems (e.g., voice) from songs.
https://www.stemroller.com/
John's Background Switcher, shuffle wallpapers from various sources
https://johnsad.ventures/software/backgroundswitcher/
Wikipedia Foundation
Etc.
https://nodezator.com/
because it was the first Python node editor which "just worked" out of the box when I tried to run it.
Based on a game dev system which was called Indie Python, the main site is now at:
https://indiesmiths.com/
I kick in to Wikipedia via Microsoft Rewards points whenever they are matching points, or if I have a surplus of Amazon gift card money 'cause there haven't been any Kindle book sales I bought into for a while.
Indirectly, buying ebooks from people on most programming languages ecosystems, graphics, cloud tooling, across all well known vendors.
- I donate to Wikipedia every year a small amount.
- It is not related to programming directly, but I try to donate to https://u24.gov.ua every month.
Unicef
UNRWA
SaveTheChildren
Greenpeace
Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders
Amnesty
It's my favorite desktop environment and application suite, and I use it both at home and profesionally
WACUP - DrO is building upon the parts of winamp that were open sourced around the Winamp 3 era and gradually building all the other parts (since Winamp was plugin based this is doable piece by piece).
Other: a couple of artists on patreon.
If I didn't have to work 5 days a week I might devote time to projects like these, since I can't donating some small amount £ feels right.
There's a lot of hungry people in the US. I grew up going to elementary school with a lot of kids who didn't eat much at home (free breakfast and lunch at school), and the results aren't pretty.
Once we can reliably feed our poorest as a society, then maybe I'll donate to something else.
Still love the software, though
No Foreign Land, not an open source project, but essentially a free cruising guide for the whole world
https://opencollective.com/ionide
My salary is paid from donations to Zig Software Foundation, for which I am extremely grateful.
I will probably also donate to FreeCAD and postgres but I have not checked if they accept donations.
I would like to single out KiCAD as the most impressive open source (?) project if you are into electronic design.
Sounds like an app idea. Who would use it?
- KeePassXC
- KDE
- Ladybird Browser
- Khan Academy
- qBittorrent
- Actual
I'm planning on having a fixed budget and giving the same amount to all of them.
Since then the only donations I've made have been in support of the Crystal language.
I should spend some time this week reflecting on this.
- Radicle - IPFS - torrents and magnet links - i2p - syncthing - PeerTube/ActivityPub
&al
There are major forces in the world trying to shut them down through defamation and they badly need funding to continue helping people in gaza.
Thunderbird
NVDA
Tor
EFF
And no longer:
Wikipedia - they have enough
Mozilla - they don't invest in FF
Considering:
Internet archive
Notepad++
My criteria are mainly what I use in my everyday life and derive value from it. What can bring additional positive change in the world and or can bring postive change to other people who cannot afford to donate themselves.
and I guess NabuCassa / homeassistant, but that's also in exchange for remote backups. Still, I want them to stay alive.
Thunderbird/Wikipedia intermittently
I wanted to donate a bit every month but didn’t manage to get the habit.
I want to donate to projects like XFCE and the Free Software Foundation.
I hear great things, i love the idea behind it, a 65 year habit is hard to break.
I'll be back soon.
I'll bite. What alternative search engine have you been using the last 65 years?
Sometimes i dont notice until mid morning.
It changes over time but currently Vue and FastEndpoints (the C# http toolkit).
Lichess (5-10$ every 3 months)
I also donated to these projects in the past:
DESEC
Homebrew
sharkdp (fd and batcat)
- The EFF
- tridactyl: https://tridactyl.xyz/
- the ACLU
- the mastodon instance I use as primary
- ad hoc to magit.vc
- a bunch of non-tech
- Emacs packages like Consult, Denote, Helm, Magit, and many others
- Anki
- Recoll
- FSF
- Virtually all community driven linux distros
If you want to make the argument that "I don't know if I can trust the maintainer to actually put my hard earn money to good use in improving the project", then I would say "just be ethical; the laborer deserves his wages".
Not so hot take: FOSS should be treated as shareware was in the 80s and 90s.
- Wikipedia
- Used to donate to visidata and will probably again, if I need it for work again
OpenBSD
Sourcehut
https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify
- Corejs + babel (donated after reading this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34859766
- Magisk . I root my Android phone because I believe that if I buy a device I should actually own it.
- Scummvm I believe in preserving computing history and scummvm does great work making older games accessible
- MisterFPGA. Instead of giving my 3 years old son a tablet, I've decided to set up MisterFPGA for him with an Amiga core for him to do kidpix and scummvm to run Adibou and the humongous games. I like the idea of him having access to a relatively simple system like the amiga where he can learn how computer work without having access to internet and learning to passively consume.
- Valetudo. I love having a robot cleaning my house. I do not love having something with a camera that's not purely local. Thanks to valetudo, I can use it without worrying about my privacy.
- Not directly a donation but I buy a yearly license to crossover to support wine development
- Calibre
- Syncthing
- The developer of Karabiner
- Internet Archive
- Free Software Foundation
I used to give to the following:
- Wikipedia (but stopped when I realized that they have more than enough donations and that I should focus on other worthy causes)
- Mozilla (but stopped when I saw the CEO increase her salary while firing and stopping important projects. I do not want a repeat of the IE monopoly with Chrome and as such I want Firefox to succeed but I have completely lost trust in Mozilla's management)
Also F-Droid (Android apps), ACLU, Doctors without Borders, PBS.
Sometimes to feddit.org over OpenCollective
SPCA (and other cat shelters) in various places
Content creators
- Sci Show https://www.youtube.com/scishow
- Escape Artists (short fiction podcasts) https://escapeartists.net/
- Technology Connections https://www.youtube.com/technologyconnections
- The Bible Project https://bibleproject.com/
- Liliputing https://liliputing.com/
- Radiotopia (99% Invisible & other podcasts) https://www.radiotopia.fm/
- PBS (local station) https://thinktv.org/
Online Services
- Internet Archive https://archive.org/
- Wikipedia https://www.wikipedia.org/
- Snopes https://www.snopes.com/
- MetaBrainz Foundation https://musicbrainz.org/
Justice
- Equal Justice Initiative https://eji.org/
- Innocence Project https://innocenceproject.org/
- International Justice Mission (IJM) https://www.ijm.org/
- Institute for Justice https://ij.org/support/give-now/?
Advocacy
- Right to Repair https://www.repair.org/
- Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) https://www.eff.org/
- Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) https://sfconservancy.org/
- Free Software Foundation (FSF) https://www.fsf.org/
Making the world a better place
- Partners in Health https://www.pih.org/
- World Central Kitchen https://wck.org/
Software
- ESLint https://eslint.org/
- FreshRSS https://freshrss.org/
- Open WRT (managed by SFC) https://openwrt.org/
- Mozilla Foundation (Firefox) https://www.mozilla.org/
Ad-blocking
- Pi-hole https://pi-hole.net/
- osid.nl domain blocklist https://www.patreon.com/sjhgvr
- Peter Lowe's domain blocklist https://www.patreon.com/blocklist
- Steven Black's blocklist https://github.com/sponsors/StevenBlack
- Ajayyy (SponsorBlock) https://sponsor.ajay.app/
Local (Troy, OH)
- Health Partners Free Clinic https://www.healthpartnersclinic.org/
- Brukner Nature Center https://www.bruknernaturecenter.com/
Past ones include VLC, Retroarch, mGBA, UNHCR, and some more local things
- Wikipedia
Signal
Pi-hole
F# Weekly
Pony
- reticulum.network, as I want the code to get audited as soon as possible - many youtubers that fight against enshitification and for spreading critical thinking mindset.
- Kiwix
- Singlefile
- Home Assistant
- Zulip
- Asahi Linux
- OpenZFS
- Django Foundation
And a handful of YouTubers / patreon ppl.
- OpenBSD
- The Pirate Bay
- Wikipedia
Neovim
local cat shelter
- QubesOS
- FSF
- Institute for Justice
- WezTerm
- Signal
What? This is news to me. Also What does it even mean?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
- https://objective-see.org/support.html (For https://github.com/objective-see/LuLu et al)
- https://www.thunderbird.net/donate (I hope none of it goes to Mozilla or Firefox. I also hope https://thundermail.com brings something than I can instead pay for, if I can or will decide to afford, instead of intermittent donations)
- https://www.borgbackup.org/support/fund.html (I would want to support https://restic.net as well as I use it so much but they never setup a way - it has been discussed :/)
- https://syncthing.net/donations
- https://github.com/Homebrew/brew#donations
- https://cryptomator.org/donate/
- https://www.patreon.com/db4s
- https://github.com/sponsors/qarmin for https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka
- https://github.com/sponsors/garethgeorge for https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest
- https://keepass.info/donate.html and https://keepassium.com/donate (Mostly the latter) (I had actually moved to StrongBox which did a U-turn on FOSS and then sold to another company. At that point I came back to KeePassium. The KeepPassium author actually took a stand a went FOSS as a principle. I think this is worth noting.)
..and few more.
… …
# The ones I support by paying for one of its services bust mostly because its FOSS app:
- https://vorta.borgbase.com
- http://ente.io (But sadly not for long; because I really can't stand a non-native "photos" app. I just can't! Otherwise it's a great service!)
Are there any interactions that you find annoying within the app? It'd be great if you could specifics, we'd like to explore what is feasible within the bounds of Flutter.
Thanks again!
It is more about aesthetics and personal preference point of view. Being mobile developer doesn't help either. The thing is you end up noticing everything that a non-native app misses and skips. Small clunks .. the way something loads and how the transition happens et cetera, some textures, corners, icons, the general UI design philosophies like some shades are simply not going to be the same in a non-native app (unless one is doing pixel to pixel matching which would defeat the purpose of picking a multi platform way to begin with).
Discussing so called "drawbacks" would be doing a disservice to your excellent product and also to your goal. I am sure you had a reason to pick up a common codebase (maybe speed; small team or something else - doesn't matter) and it's really a fine product. It's just about my personal preference.
Thank you for these fine FOSS apps and good luck!
(I still be using Ente Auth fwiw - because there are no better alternatives, let alone a better native alternative :-) 2FAS could have come close but it's not there at all)
We chose a cross-platform framework to keep the team small, longevity is important for a company like Ente.
Also, we understand moving to native is inevitable. We should have sufficient engineering bandwidth to invest in a rewrite towards the end of 2026. Hopefully you will give us another shot then :)
Thanks again!