Looking over at my #FOSScan this morning I saw it was full. Time to count it up and make some FOSS donations!
The change collected since I last emptied the can (wow) 16 months ago amounted to US$62.00. Yikes! I guess the lockdowns over the last year plus have really stifled the opportunities to go out and collect spare change.
After a bit of frustration, I've made the following donations today:
- $28.84 to the Late Night Linux podcast. While not a FOSS project per se, they do a lot when it comes to communicating to and evangelizing for the FOSS community. And I've been listening for years and never donated, so this is a bit of a make-good.
- $13.12 to the NeoMutt project.
- $20.04 to the MATE Desktop project.
If those amounts seem kind of strange it's because of USD to GBP conversion.
I wanted to donate to the XFCE Desktop project but they made it too goddamn difficult to give them money. They only take funds via Bountysource, so I actually went out of my way and tried to create a Bountysource account. Unfortunately the sign-up process is completely broken (at least, at the moment), doesn't send email confirmation or password reset emails, and didn't give me any link or button to actually give the project money (probably because my email address wasn't confirmed).
Hey XFCE team (and several other projects I visited today), put a fucking PayPal "donate" button on your website and maybe you'll get some contributions next time. Not everyone wants to sign up for Patreon or the payment processor du jour to give you money. PayPal is pretty damn ubiqitous so make it easy for donators to actually donate, okay?
Anyway, this count brings my #FOSScan donations to
a total of US$164.94 since I started the project in 2019. Considering
this is in addition to my regular annual donations to specific projects and
organizations, I guess an extra $55 $82 a year in FOSS funding is not too bad.
I'm going to have to work on finding opportunities to add to the can, and see if I can't
bump that closer to $100 a year in spare change donations.
Do you have a #FOSScan of your own? If not, eat a can of soup (or beans, veggies.. whatever), make your own #FOSScan, and start collecting spare change for Free Software and related projects today! Together, we can make a difference in Free Software funding.
EDIT: math fail.