I’ve never been a charitable person.
There, I said it.
It’s not that I don’t care enough, it’s that I’ve always been somewhat selfish
with my “hard earned dollars”.
That said, this past January I read Dave Ramsay’s The Total Money
Makeover and one of my main takeaways was that after I reach a certain
point of financial freedom, I should be more charitable with my new found
wealth.
Then a few days later I stumbled upon Bryan Lunduke’s article about donating to
one free software project every month.
This really got me thinking. I’ve been using free and open-source software for
the better part of my life, and very rarely have I contributed to any projects.
Sure, it’s free as in freedom but it’s also free as in somebody put their time
into making something amazing and should be rewarded for their efforts.
As part of my 2017 goals, I decided to start being more charitable and accepted
the challenge to donate to one free software project (or service) that I use per
month.
Because I haven’t quite achieved the financial goals that I want to achieve I
decided to start small, donating around twenty bucks per month.
Why around that? Because depending on the project I’ve had to donate in a
foreign currency and it throws things off a bit.
Having completed my sixth donation this year, I figured it was time to talk
about things. Specifically, the fact that I am now maintaining a repo on Github
that contains a list of a bunch of different free projects and services and
organizations and content creators that you can donate to.
I couldn’t find a decent list of projects and links to donate, so figured I may
as well put together a list as I research the projects that I would like to
donate to.
Thus far I’ve donated to Ubuntu, Let’s Encrypt, Debian, rEFInd, dotdeb.org and
most recently GnuPG.
The other reason I wanted to get this post out there is because GnuPG is
currently in the middle of a fundraising rally so if you’re looking to
get into the donation game, they’d be a great first pick!
There’s still another six months of donations left for this year, but I’m
already thinking about 2017. I’m shooting to push my monthly donations up to
100$ per month and instead of hand picking things, setup a bunch of recurring
donations in January.
If you pull the trigger on some donations after reading this post, hit me up in
the comments section and let me know about it!
