Hello, I started donating to my favourite open-source projects a couple years ago, but stopped about 6 months ago for different reasons and wanted to get back into it.

I wanted to ask if anyone here has a set system or process they follow when donating

• How much money do you donate? A set amount, whatever you feel like, a percentage of your earnings?

• When do you donate? Whenever you remember, on the first of the month, Thursdays?

• Do you have a minimum donation amount?

• How do you decide what projects to support? Do you forego donations if you've contributed in other ways? Do you keep a list?

• Do you donate to all equally or do you have some sort of ranking? Is it by amount of use, subjective preference, something else?

• What platforms do you prefer using? Liberapay, Opencollective, Patreon, ko-fi, Paypal, Monero, actual post?

So far the system I've devised for myself would go something like:

• put 2 % of all my earnings, whatever they are, in a separate account
• every quarter (on the first of January, April, July and October) donate the full amount of money in the account (with a minimum of 5 €, so as not to lose a big amount in fees)
• keep a ranked list of projects that I've used or deemed important or promising in the last three months (projects I donated to recently go to the bottom of the list), things at the top get more money than things at the bottom
• prioritise Liberapay since it's open-source itself

After trying to understand if Synapse was still the preferred community method for Matrix after the post on Element X/ESS, I thought I'd share this.

Element Starter is a game-changer, offering a free (as in beer) self-hosted version of Element Server Suite. It is a lightweight version of the officially supported Kubernetes-based components found in our paid packages (Business, Enterprise and Sovereign) - the very same stack used to power the biggest Matrix homeservers in the world; built by the team who created Matrix.

Element Starter is designed to allow anyone in the world (who doesn’t need to start with our powerful paid-for enterprise features) to adopt Element Server Suite for free. This option gives them all the real-time communication functionality they expect from a leading messaging and collaboration app with the added benefit of self-hosting to ensure data ownership and control, while building on a wrought-iron foundation which is futureproofed for commercial support and features on demand.

Really surprised I can't located migration methods anywhere, though. And that all the Element X app repos are still labeled pre-release but the blog says they are production ready.

Edit: This does require sign in and terms of use agreements, so I'll be sticking to my Synapse docker container for now.

In the second finding of the 2024 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer survey, we found that the more maintainers are paid, the more improvements they make to their projects.

...

In the previous finding, we reported that 60% of maintainers describe themselves as unpaid hobbyists, and 36% of maintainers describe themselves as paid (professional or semi-professional) maintainers, earning some or all of their income from their open source work.

...

When you break down the paid maintainers into professional (earning most or all of their income from their maintenance work) and semi-professional (earning some of their income from maintaining projects), it becomes clear that the amount of money a maintainer is making for their work has a large impact on the types of improvements they are able to make. Across nearly all major categories, professional maintainers are on average over 20 percentage points more likely to make key improvements to their projects than semi-professional maintainers.

...

In the previous study, 81% percent of professional maintainers earning most or all of their income from maintaining projects spend more than 20 hours a week maintaining their projects. This year, the percentage was nearly identical (82%).

Conversely, in last year’s survey, we found that the vast majority of unpaid hobbyists spend ten hours or less per week on their maintenance work (81%). This percentage also stayed consistent in this year’s survey, with 78% of unpaid hobbyist maintainers working ten hours or less per week.

...

We’ve heard from many maintainers that how they are paid for their work also matters. For many maintainers there is a huge difference between getting a one-time “airdrop” of money, perhaps right after a high profile incident where people are paying attention to their projects, compared to ongoing recurring income that they can count on. So this year for the first time we asked maintainers to tell us whether they would prefer to get predictable monthly income or a one-time lump payment.

An overwhelming majority of maintainers prefer to receive predictable monthly income, with 81% choosing that option.

Zuckerberg claims that “Open Source AI Is the Path Forward.” While it’s easy to agree with Zuckerberg’s sentiment, Llama 3.1 isn’t truly open source and wouldn’t meet the criteria for compliance under the OSAID. This raises important questions about how to engage with Meta: should the open-source community push them away, or guide them toward creating OSAID-compliant models?

Can't imagine using my system without this.

I’m just looking for a simple 2D floor planner that is easy to use and has the ability to show measurements.

The two most recommended open source tools I’ve seen have shortcomings.

Sweet Home 3D:

• Very 3D centric, which over complicates things.
• Project was recently acquired/handed off to a company and the iOS version is published by “AI Photo Editor Lab SRL”

draw.io / diagrams.net:

• Very finicky to set up and create floor plans
• To display measurements one has to add measurement objects to every wall/object

Does anyone have other recommendations?

https://github.com/umutcamliyurt/IrisChat

Hi

I'm looking for a FOSS app to design icons

I heard of GIMP , Kirta and Inkscape ,are there other alternatives ? and which one of them is the best for this ?

Thanks

Element is launching the world’s first communications platform based on the upcoming Matrix 2.0 release. The result is blazing performance which outperforms the mainstream alternatives - across a decentralised system that enables self-hosting and end-to-end encryption - as well as open standard interoperability to revolutionise real time communication between large organisations.

Built on Matrix 2.0, Element X now rivals the performance of centralised consumer messaging apps, empowering organisations to address the shadow IT issues caused by consumer-grade messaging apps in the workplace.

The new Element communications solution consists:

• Element X, our next-gen app with an array of new features
• Element Call fully integrated into Element X, for native Matrix-encrypted voice and video
• Element Server Suite, our backend hosting solution for powerful admin control and Matrix 2.0 performance

Hi, was wondering if anyone knew of an app where you can use your camera to scan documents (like Adobe Scan) which is FOSS.

I'm looking for an alarm clock app alternative to the Google Clock, which I use mainly because it allows me to link a Spotify playlist to an alarm. Do you know about any app with similar characteristics? If not, then what is the best alarm clock app you would recommend?

Detailed post about FSFE's goals and main topics in 2024.

Table of contents:

• Device Neutrality: the Free Software community “shows its teeth”
• Next Generation Internet and the lack of long-term sustainable funding for Free Software
• Reaching Generation Alpha: Youth Hacking 4 Freedom and Ada & Zangemann
• Policy work: Advocating for Free Sotware
• Legal Support: giving advise to projects and individuals Our work on public awareness
• Join the movement

With a lot of open source projects being worked on largely out of passion rather than financial gain I feel like there must have been several times where a release caught people off guard and "came out of nowhere" with its impressive scale.

To give some examples of how this might happen maybe it was an initial release dropped to the public in a complete state that had been worked on for a while privately or a project that was dormant for an extended period of time and picked back up.

Can anyone here think of an example? It doesn't necessarily need to be something groundbreaking maybe it got people excited in a very specific niche.

If you do have an answer I'd appreciate it if you could elaborate on it.

Open source software is essential to the global economy, public services, and international organizations, yet many critical projects remain underfunded, highlighting the need for sustainable support.

The United Nations and other public institutions are increasingly recognizing the importance of open source, with initiatives like the Global Digital Compact and various national funds dedicated to supporting open source projects.

GitHub is actively involved in bridging the sustainability gap through initiatives like GitHub Sponsors, the FOSS Sustainability Fund, and resources for open source maintainers, emphasizing the need for collaborative investment from both public and private sectors.

After more than two years FlorisBoard (an open-source keyboard which respects your privacy) 0.4.0 is finally released with many new features including MDY support, addons store, incognito mode, major smartbar rework and many other bugfixes and improvements.

Regarding the spell checking (from GitHub release notes):

Word suggestions/spell checking are not included in the current releases and are a major goal for the v0.5 milestone.

Mastodon Toot.

Project.

This is the last minor release before v7, but it's packed with interesting new features

• Separate audio and video streams for more flexibility
• Browse subtitles in the transcription widget
• Set up Youtube-dl for smoother imports
• And much more!

PeerTube is a decentralized and federated alternative to YouTube. The goal of PeerTube is not to replace YouTube but to offer a viable alternative using the strength of ActivityPub and P2P protocols.

Being built on ActivityPub means PeerTube is able to be part of a bigger social network, the Fediverse (the Federated Universe). On the other hand, P2P technologies help PeerTube to solve the issue of money, inbound with all streaming platform : With PeerTube, you don't need to have a lot of bandwidth available on your server to host a PeerTube platform because all users (which didn't disable the feature) watching a video on PeerTube will be able to share this same video to other viewers.

If you are curious about PeerTube, I can't recommend you enough to check the official website to learn more about the project. If after that you want to try to use PeerTube as a content creator, you can try to find a platform available there to register or host yourself your own PeerTube platform on your own server.

The development of PeerTube is actually sponsored by Framasoft, a french non-for-profit popular educational organization, a group of friends convinced that an emancipating digital world is possible, convinced that it will arise through actual actions on real world and online with and for you!

Framasoft is also involved in the development of Mobilizon, a decentralized and federated alternative to Facebook Events and Meetup.

If you want to contribute to PeerTube, feel free to:

• report bugs and give your feedback on Github or on our forums
• submit your brillant ideas on our Feedback platform
• Help to translate the software, following the contributing guide
• Make a donation to help to pay bills inbound in the development of PeerTube.

Just wanted to highlight this project because I've had to take many personality tests for school and work and things, and this is the most accurate one I've seen, and the only one where I feel I'm actually learning about myself from the results.

So if you need a personality test for any reason this one's pretty good.