Profit donating scheme: shortlist suggestions wanted
Issue 12 will be posted out to subscribers this week (and be on UK newsstands next week). Which means: we’re a year old! And which also means: it’s time for our first profit donating scheme. We’re still a young and growing company, so we won’t have a lot of money to give out this year, but we want it to have an effect nonetheless.
We’ll have more details about this in issue 13, and a way for subscribers and readers to vote. But in the meantime, we’d love to have your suggestions for software projects and groups that should appear in the shortlist. Maybe you believe we should support the EFF, or perhaps there’s a certain distro or program that needs financial help.
Let us know in the comments below, and then we’ll move on to the voting stage!
About The Author
Mike Saunders
Mike stores his data by printing out hex dumps and laminating the sheets. He's the author of The Haynes Linux Manual and the creator of MikeOS, an operating system hand-built from assembly language.
Suggestions:
– FileZilla to remove the adware now in the sourceforge installer
– Nixie Pixel https://www.patreon.com/nixiepixel
It would be wonderful if LinuxVoice could one day be built using Freesoftware tools.
– GIMP
– Scribus
Or any other tool which you feel you need to author the magazine.
I agree. Supporting a bit of software that could be used to help improve the production of the magazine on Linux would be a double win. Others might include Inkscape or possibly LibreOffice (although they probably have enough funding compared to others).
Scribus is the big one (we writers all use Gimp for editing screenshots etc.) With a few extras in Scribus, we could potentially ditch InDesign and be 100% FOSS in our production cycle! It’s something we’d really like to do in the long run…
If you were to try Scribus and create a list of the top features in InDesign that are not in Scribus that could go a long way to help make Scribus more migration friendly. It would also help if you identified features in InDesign that are not in Scribus that are showstoppers.
If a lot of InDesign people did this and shared this publicly, it might help prioritize the features list for Scribus.
Yes, good ideas. Our Art Ed (Stacey) is currently trying to recreate a section of the magazine in Scribus, and will report back on any problems/limitations. I think it’d be so cool if we could pay someone to fix issues we find, so we can switch!
How about Gravit? (http://gravit.io/)
When Adobe killed Freehand, it sabotaged the future of my favorite design software. This opened my eyes to the importance of free software and served as a catalyst to finally stop “renting my pencils” from Apple & Adobe.
Now I run linux full time – but I seriously miss the design tools on the Mac. I’d love to see a free software Freehand clone.
Gravit is looking good, sooo very close — but needs that extra push to achieve production-grade status.
I absolutely agree.
Plus invest more money to improve quality of your articles, some of them lately seemed to be rushed out. A review system by registered knowledgable LV readers would be an interesing project.
+1 donate to what you need and use. Maybe you can fund specific features or bug fixes that you require.
As a bonus it might mean that you can reduce your spending on proprietary software, and have more profits to donate next year.
That was meant to be a reply to Andrew. Gimp and Scribus (plus any other tools you need/use).
(I think if you fail the captcha, it cancels the reply)
+1 donate to what you need and use.
Thirdconded
Tupi 2d animation soft: http://www.maefloresta.com/portal/
Used by hundreds of thousands of kids all over the world to learn animation:
http://www.segtsy.com/blog/?p=765
Are we allowed to vote for more of the profits to fo back to LV? – I thought the suggestion to do some FOSS related pre-election questioning of future MPs would be worth some extra cash 🙂
I’d also be up for a split between real software projects (krita/KDE/Gnome etc), and more legal / political organisations (FSF / Pirate Party etc) – to make sure that at least some of the moenty goes in both directions.
Happy Almost Birthday! 🙂
Rent a beefy VM for a year to run some extra Tor exit nodes? You are in a much stronger position (freedom of press maybe!) than a home connection to fight any frivilous lawsuits if it were abused.
Donate to something desktop related, server based technologies often are being used by large companies (and thus ‘should’ have some funding).
I’d vote giving it to KDE, Cinnamon or LXQT
I agree with scribus or gimp.
And maybe the open rights group too?
Happy birthday, Linux Voice! 😀
Also following the trend of design tools, might I also suggest (in addition to Scribus and GIMP) both Inkscape and Krita.
Perhaps LibreOffice too, given the usefulness of a complete office suite (and how wide a base it would benefit).
GNU MediaGoblin (http://mediagoblin.org ) could really use some love. They support .pdf already, along with still-image media, and limited audio and video. Maybe with some development support they could add .epub media, too (and Linux Voice could use it for hosting digital issues and the various components that make it up, plus the podcast!)
(Scribus seems like an appropriate investment as well, though).
I agree with other commenters about tools that you need and would like to suggest additional tools that I find useful:
Lyx [lyx.org]
Lime Text Editor [limetext.org]
I would like to actually see the guys working on the open source drivers to get some cash.
The drivers are getting on well and have potential but need money to buy new hardware and possibly pay for extra help. I would love to have the default drivers for GNU/Linux systems to also be the best and therefore remove the need to go driver hunting at all for some people.
Same for me:
Fund the tools you use, whatever they are. Or support something more fundamental/ideological like digital rights, security/privacy (OpenSSL, Tor, crypto and the likes).
Maybe an interesting crowd-funded project ? However, I have no idea what’s being done currently.
I would also say Scribus and something that can print decent photos, I haven’t found any of the ones available to be very good 🙁
Some good suggestions. I’d also like to see some love for various packages used in science – scikit-learn, qgis, matplotlib etc. Also, some widely used fundamentals like python can always use a little extra cash. Keep up the good work!
I agree with the suggestions for Scribus, but I’d also like to see some of the ‘infrastructure’ projects get support (i.e. not user facing apps). For example, look how OpenSSL struggled along for years and only got some decent funding when it turned out the security software 75% of the internet was using had a major hole. Not that I’m saying give money to OpenSSL, but those sort of low-visibility high importance projects.
Software Freedom Conservancy, which acts as an umbrella taking care of all the boring but important administrative work of several important FLOSS projects, such as git, Samba, and many many others. https://sfconservancy.org/
IntercoolerJS is looking for both financial and human capital support! Great project with an awesome core team: http://intercoolerjs.org/
GPG. It’s relied upon so heavily by so many but is currently maintained by a single underpaid developer[1]. In the current climate I think it’s one of the most vital software projects in the world.
[1] https://gnupg.org/blog/20141214-gnupg-and-g10.html
Scribus does seem like a good idea. Another option would be the OpenBSD project. I know, I know — it’s not Linux. But they do a lot of good work to increase the entire free software ecosystem, from developing OpenSSH and libressl to implementing security features that break third party software (which then gets patched).
My preference would be for the money to go to projects that know what they’ll actually do with it, and that are transparent and accountable enough that we can be sure that they put the money to good use. Too many projects have a ‘Please donate’ button, but give no information on why one should donate and what the donations will be used for. I expect that often the project member don’t know themselves.
That said, I think, e.g., ‘buying beer for the main author’ is a valid reason to ask for donations. But then this should be listed on the donation page. And preferably, the project should list what previous donations have been used for (this need not be detailed financial report, but we should be able to expect a minimum of transparency).
A few recommendations:
KDE. They publish quarterly reports of activities, with incomes and expenses listed: https://ev.kde.org/reports/
Krita. They had a successful Kickstarter campaign (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-open-source-digital-painting-accelerate-deve/description), that listed exactly what the funds would be used for, and have followed this by impressively detailed status updates, both at the Kickstarter page, the Krita homepage and on various blogs.
GCompris. They have an ongoing ‘flexible funding’ Indiegogo campaign for reworking all the in-game graphics by a graphic artist: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/new-unified-graphics-for-gcompris
This will be closed before the LinuxVoice funds will be distributed, but I’m sure it will be possible to donate funds to GCompris earmarked to the graphics rework.
Software Freedom Conservancy. A very worthwhile cause. I also find their effort to create accounting software for non-profit organizations (in free software and other fields) interesting.
Snowdrift.coop. A non-profit platform for sustained funding of free projects (software, but also other free/libre/open projects). This is a rather new, unproven, project, but I have the impression that they care much about transparency and accountability, and I hope the project will turn out as a viable means of sustained funding of free software.
Krita (krita.org) is a already a great open source paint program.
It is becoming even better at high speed. But to keep up that speed, money is needed.
The FOSS Scene needs more artists and those need tools.
And while gimp is great for photo processing, Krita is miles ahead for original artwork.
Back while LV was staring its kickstarter campaign I found out about it via the linux mint blog. At the time they stated they might look into creating a desktop app for viewing, reading searching the LV content once it had been released on the CC licence. Now there is content available, a donation to kickstart the linux mint app would close the circle.
I think some of the money should be spent on porting systemd to mike OS
A big +1 for KDE
As others have suggested, I recommend donating to open source projects that can help the community become more competitive against proprietary media editing software: GIMP, Inkscape, and Scribus.
The one I couldn’t turn into linux was because of a missing worthy photoshop replacement, so gimp and what you use/need to be 100% floss, so scribus
Completely unoriginal list:
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Free Software Foundation
Software Freedom Conservancy
Anything that will make GnuTLS/OpenSSL/LibreSSL/BoringSSL better (GnuTLS is important because the OpenSSL license is GPL-incompatible, making it hard to distribute (A)GPL software with SSL support.
Happy Birthday Linux Voice!
How about sponsoring something like Code Club in an area that needs it?
https://www.codeclub.org.uk/
How about NixiePixel (aka Nicole), with 6 or 7 years
opensource vodcasts:
Nixie Pixel https://www.patreon.com/nixiepixel
Hello!
My shortlist is:
– Ardour project
– The Document Foundation (LibreOffice)
– Inkscape (through Software Freedom Conservancy)
– Mozilla Foundation (Firefox)
– GNOME
Regards!
Scribus, maby that thing, or other peices of sowftware or projects that let the entire magazine be free. Especially this first year maybe the first 10 the investimate should be in the tools used to improve Linux Voice.
I suggest Trisquel GNU/Linux distribution. It is one of the best fully free as in freedom distributions out there and also really easy to use and good looking. Trisquel has just made a major release and it deserves backing.
I would suggest the Open Rights Group and EFF, especially as the threat of the Snoopers’ Charter has returned in the last few days.
As for free software projects, I suggest donating to Lime Text, as it’s a free software alternative to Sublime Text. At the moment it’s not in the package managers and it is very hard to install. I think if it could be made more accessible, more people would use it.
Scribus. Eat your dogfood! 🙂
I would love the Linux Voice to be self-supportive by using entirely free software in its creation. I know this mirrors what others have said, but applications such as Scribus, Gimp/Krita/Inkscape would be well deserved awardees of your profits. As distributions go, the Sonar project would benefit greatly by supporting those users with disabilities and sensory impairments. Finally, the Electronic Frontier Foundation does a fine job standing up for individual’s privacy in cyberspace.
I agree with many of the above– it’s a really appealing idea that the magazine could use this money to strengthen the projects that could (some day) allow LV to be produced entirely with Free software.