• ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    archive.org

    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.

    Edit: Missed the FOSS part, but still, its worth mentioning. archive.org is not an open source software, but they are a non-profit doing something that benefits all of us. And they are transparent about how they operate. More like a “Free and Transparent Community Service”, rather than “FOSS”. And not to mention, the many FOSS software they could preserve in case they stop getting maintained, so they could get picked up later, and not be forever lost. It goes hand-in-hand with the philosophy of FOSS: benefiting society.

  • drathvedro@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    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.

  • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • csolisr@hub.azkware.net
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      2 months ago

      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

  • मुक्त@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • stinky@redlemmy.com
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      2 months ago

      brings massive amounts of information to the public, worldwide, in almost every language, for free without advertisements

    • freeman@feddit.org
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      2 months ago

      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.

  • comma@midwest.socialOP
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    2 months ago

    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
    • freeman@feddit.org
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      2 months ago

      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.

  • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    LibreOffice or other open source office suites. 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.

    Especially if you use Linux as a daily driver: KDE, GNOME, XFCE, Lxqt, other desktop environments. Unless you know how to do everything from the command line, they’re probably the things allowing you to use Linux at all. Think about how much funding Windows or Mac development gets, that’s because making a full graphical shell and suite of up to date system apps is difficult as fuck and they’re massive codebases that require constant maintenance. One could even argue that their development and maintenance is a bigger undertaking than the Linux kernel itself yet most Linux users never think about them, nor do they have the backing of large companies like the kernel does because pretty much all of them use Windows on their workstations even if their server infrastructure runs Linux. And high quality graphical environments are absolutely critical if we’re ever to have hope of Linux being adopted by the general public and not just developers and power users. If you use Linux as your main OS and have the cash to spare, considering tossing even a quarter of the cost of a Windows license you didn’t buy to your DE of choice and do your part in ensuring that DE stays usable in the future.

  • molave@reddthat.com
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    2 months ago
    1. Are they useful and/or essential for you/your causes?
    2. Is their funding model transparent?
    3. Do they need more funds to hit their financial goal for sustaining themselves?

    If all answers are “yes”, donate to them.

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
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    2 months ago

    You can donate to the general fund of Software in the Public Interest and let them figure out which of their projects (Debian is the most prominent one) needs the money most.

    https://www.spi-inc.org/donations/

    One advantage over Software Freedom Conservancy is that, if my memory serves, SFC criticized Richard Stallman and his appointment to the FSF board over the manufactured controversies of the last few years, SPI didn’t.