That article made me think about what free software I rely on daily and what support I give it. So I just made a donation to the Mozilla foundation, and Audacity, and the Diaspora foundation, Ardour and an encryption tool I use for email. So now I’m donating $25 / month, but hopefully this helps make software accessible for people who can’t afford to donate.
I also discovered that Ubuntu Studio, my OS, takes no donations at all and everybody working on it is a hobbyist.
I haven’t yet looked through my mobile to figure out what to support, but f-droid, OSM and CycleStreets will probably get at least a one-time support…
I’m making a resolution to pay a bit more attention to the donate button for things I actually use.
However, especially for the more invisible parts of infrastructure, I do think this should be collectively funded as infrastructure. It was a good use of tax money for the German government to have been paying for GPG and all of our governments should be looking at how to help support free software in order to enable citizens to be productive, creative and safe online.
