Donating to Open Source Free Software Projects

Once per year I review which software I've used most and to which projects I'd like to donate some money to in return. After all, free software is not "free as in beer" but "free as in freedom". This time around I donated to six projects which had the most impact on my daily use of computers and smartphones.

As I use Ubuntu on countless devices including several servers my first donation went to them this year. Also, I think their push for a single OS and user interface for all devices from smartphone to TV is an important project that should be funded and supported.

Firefox and Thunderbird are my web browser, email client and calendar of choice and Mozilla is far too much dependent on donations from the advertising industry. My donation will change little in that regard but every penny counts.

Without Libreoffice, Linux on the desktop is hardly imaginable and so I decided to donate something to the TDF (The Document Foundation) as well. Great job done guys, thanks very much!

A website I visit several times a day is Wikipedia so I decided to donate to the Wikimedia foundation as well.

Again, my world without that project would be quite different. Another big thanks goes to Openstreetmap. In addition to regularly updating and contributing to the database I felt it would be a good thing to donate some money for to keep their infrastructure running.

And finally I made small donation to the KeypassX project as I rely on their software to keep my passwords save day in and day out.

Thanks to all people working on these projects, paid or volunteering, the computing world would be not as great as it is today without you!