Open source software has always played a very big role in my life. For the longest time, I have seen open source through the eyes of a consumer, taking advantage of software like Audacity or Notepad++. Admittedly, the UX of some of these apps is a little rough around the corners, but they make very powerful software available freely to anyone around the world.
In the last few years, I have been also maintaining my own projects and have made various contributions to projects, ranging from projects made by or with friends (shoutout to Lev, Anthony and Mikkel) to larger projects. Unfortunately, these contributions are spread across multiple accounts that I want to keep separate for reasons, so you'll have to take my word here :P
Being active in FOSS circles has just increased my appreciation for all the hard work going into these projects, sometimes done just by a small team or even a single person! This is why a while back, I decided it might be a good idea to start giving back to some people and/or projects.
The plan
Since I'm a student and only work a little bit part-time, my money doesn't grow on trees. This is why my plan is very simple: once a month, I will sponsor one person or project with a small amount (~5-10 euros) that won't break my bank.
The rationale is very simple - if I can spend 5 euros a month on a streaming service, I can also spend that amount on supporting the development of amazing people pouring their heart into great software.
Projects I've supported so far
So far, these are the projects/orgs/people I have donated to:
- 5€ to KDE e.V. for their contributions to Plasma, a DE I used for a long time
- $15 to YaLTeR (Ivan Molodetskikh) for their incredible work on Niri, which was a gamechanger for my workflow and has not failed me ever since I switched to it
- $5 to Giacomo Cavalieri for their contributions to the Gleam ecosystem, and their awesome article about snapshot testing which showed how fun testing can be if you rethink how it works
- $5 to Servo for their incredible progress on building a new browser engine (in Rust 🦀).
Future plans
Here are some people/projects that I would love to sponsor in the future, in no particular order:
- antfu for their insane contributions to the JS/Vite/Vue ecosystem
- gabehf for their work on Koito, which has completely replaced last.fm for me
- Inrixia for their work on TidaLuna, a client mod for the Tidal client which has elevated my Tidal listening experience exponentially
- Glance for making my browser's homepage so much nicer :)
- kawaiiDango for creating PanoScrobbler, which has been great for integrating with Koito (mentioned above) and taking music tracking into my own hands instead of relying on 3rd party services
Some friends who I might also consider sponsoring at some point in time (and you should definitely sponsor them too!):
Either way, I'm not sure if I'll be able to maintain the monthly sponsorships, but I definitely want to continue supporting OSS projects whenever I can :)