Open Source Lab (OSL) at Oregon State University Is losing funding
Sad to see a part of the open source community struggle
Hello,
A part is quite likely an understatement. The last couple of years have been difficult to say the least because of massive economic pressures. Sadly, people don’t behave very rational in those scenarios and don’t spend their money on what is best for the future, but they instead satisfy some immediate needs. That even includes me. I paid my electricity bill to my monster of an electricity company which is making billions a year first before I started to think about to which of my favourite open source projects I would donate first.
In the real word, we are all massively benefitting from free software. Without it, there would not be any of these large corporations because they all use a lot of it. They don’t really like giving back tho. And sometimes that is even a bit difficult because how many different people have contributed to a distribution? How do I allocate it all fairly? Hard questions, because it is not the number of lines of code that count. It counts what problems someone has identified, fixed and shipped the solution. Those are the real heroes.
Often that is some bloke working through nights in his basement (obligatory xkcd):
OSL is a great place and their track record of achievements and support for the open source community is huge. Please go and donate to them if you can (I have heard that there are a couple of rules around it to ensure your donation is actually going to the Computing division, so please check before making a donation).
But don’t forget others. Don’t forget the smaller people and don’t forget that every single bit helps. But it of course has to be a larger number of people who need to come together to support something, because - let’s face it - a $5 donation is not going very far at all.
We have had releases of updates for IPFire where in the period of one week after the release have only collected $25. That probably does not even pay for the data traffic when people are downloading the release.
Costs have gone up. Hard. Hosting actually is not even the worst offender, because the most valuable resource in a project like this is people’s time. Time for development, support, testing, writing documentation, translation, you name it. And when people are busy because they are working an extra job on the side, or are depressed because they should not spend too much money on going out to enjoy a beer with their friends, then there is definitely no motivation to do something good.
Things like OSL can help you with saving time. They care about some of the hosting headaches so you can focus more on your project. There are other organisations who do very similar things. Let’s support those, too.
But all those hosting is worthless if we don’t have people who actually get down to the bottom and create all this software that we all like to use. The world is moving fast. We got to keep up.
So, if you can, go out and support your favourite open source projects. Donate. Invest your time. Do testing, report bugs. Help the people to create.
And please don’t only do this in times of crisis. Do it consistently and show the people that you actually care about the software that they are creating, too.
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It’s difficult to give when you’re on a tight budget. There are so many worthy causes to support: health, poverty, the climate, etc.
And we already donate a large portion of our income to the community: taxes, VAT, social security, mutual insurance companies, insurance, etc.
I think it’s the companies that use open source to develop and sell their own products and services that should fund it.
Yet, I’ve personally donated to IPFIre.
I’ve also spent a lot of time testing, but when I report a problem, present tests, and propose a solution, the only response is: “I don’t have the problem you’re describing, so it’s not a problem for anyone.”
It’s quite frustrating and discouraging.
Yes. I have had to redistribute my donations recently. At various points, I have donated to Wikipedia and several Patreons of content I enjoy. Sometimes life circumstances (such as second mortgage for a new roof) dictate such re-prioritizing. Currently IPFire is my only donation and I hope the recurring donation can be increased at some point.
Ive donated to ipfire in the past and some other open source projects until money got tight and i couldn’t sustain the payments anymore. I think its a good thing companies and regular people donate to what they use or feel strongly about in order to advance the cause.
In theory yes. I personally have the feeling that my tax money is actually not being spent a lot on the things that would benefit me or my neighbours. Instead it is being funnelled into large corporations through “government contracts” which never deliver anything and only give a few photo opportunities. YMMV.
I think this is what we are now all feeling here… Individuals actually consider making a donation. Business never really does… Not many at least…
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So many things going on with this. I donate to IP fire, Wikipedia. Electronic freedom foundation. American civil liberties Union, public but I use so much free software. Oregon State University is in my state and I will contact my representative as they are budgeting right now. One thing I’ve never understood is why my state Oregon spent $800 million on software from Oracle that didn’t work and we got no money back. And yet we have Oregon State University with it awesome computer science program. Why the state did not pay them to create the software is always confusing to me. Like governments pay Microsoft for crappy operating system and software is a mystery when they could be buying support from open software and helping instead of subsidizing corporations. Ohwhat times we live in. Awesome things and horrible things in the space of a week
Exactly.
I have an answer for this: Lobbying and “Marketing”. Nobody has ever been fired for buying IBM. It seems to be a “safe bet”, but the track record is beyond what is normal.
Open Source software is great. It really is the backbone even of those companies. Nice to see that we still have people here who understand and champion it. Best of luck with your representative. Let us know what they said.