FOSS 2011 donation nominations

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

When making this thread I saw a checkbox to notify members, and I checked it. I think that had the effect of sending out an email to everyone. FYI -- that's why you got one (if you did).

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

I'd like to nominate Trisquel (https://trisquel.info/en). It's a fully free (as in speech) GNU/Linux distribution that's based on Ubuntu.

http://duckduckgo.com/free_and_open_source_software

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

What is FOSS?

newbie here...

atomic1fi..

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

FOSS means Free and Open Source Software

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

donate to Diaspora* please ! and work together to built some cool features like #tag results ; )

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

I would like to nominate the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). A non-profit organisation dedicated to the furthering of Free Software, and the promotion of freedom in a emerging digital society. It work affects Free Software and freedom in the digital age all over the world (not only in Europe) through his dedicated work on all political levels from local countries to the EU and up to the United Nations.

scepticra..

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

I would like to nominate the Tor Project as well because of how useful it is and how its ideals of privacy and security match those of DDG.

Keeping in the same vein, TAILS could really do with some funding given that they are trying to make TAILS bootable from USB (already possible, but not easy by any means).

EFF are always looking for donations and I feel that their work in developing HTTPS Everywhere (a Firefox addon) justifies the donation if nothing else.

Truecrypt and I2P have been mentioned, I agree that those should be supported. Just my 2 cents :)

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

OpenBSD/OpenSSH

TOR

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Diasporaproject was a diasapointment :(

They asked for money and got at least 100x what they had planned for yet development actually slowed down!

Drug addled + huge funding boost = longer development cycle.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

I nominate LuaJIT. Its only developer Mike Pall lives from sponsorship: http://luajit.org/sponsors.html

LuaJIT is the fastest dynamic language implementation I know. It is a source of inspiration for other JIT implementations, especially JavaScript virtual machines.

The LuaJIT FFI library is also the most advanced I know. It can basically parse C headers and allow you to call library functions with little effort. It also allows you to use native C data types in Lua.

Sadly few people are interested in LuaJIT, because few people code in Lua. But regardless of whether you do or not, odds are that the techniques used in LuaJIT will be used in other dynamic languages implementations in the next few years (it has already begun with eg. PyPy, V8...).

cdysthe

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

I nominate Linux Mint. A very successful Linux distribution with the user, new and experienced as their focus. They also offer DDG as search in installed browsers. They rely on donations to be able to develop their products and I know a contribution from DDG will be put to good use benefiting users all over the world.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

TOR project for me too. What they do is way more important than having another handful of GNU/Linux distributions (just my opinion, no offense) and supporting their cause makes a lot of sense from a DDG approach to privacy point of view.

tosho

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Tor

edit:

TrueCrypt ( this soft is the BOMB :)

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

The GNU project (via the FSF), because they build great tools for all kinds of use cases
The Linux Foundation for funding development of GNU/Linux

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

The Linux Foundation is concerned only with the development of the kernel Linux, not GNU.

octoquad

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

I would like to see a portion of the donations go to either:

Miro - http://www.getmiro.com/give/
FSF
Mozilla
EFF or
YaCY - The Peer to Peer Search Engine

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

ReactOS
TOR
TrueCrypt

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

NetBSD

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

I should nominate a, "very long time coming - but massive potential project" OMV!

OMV stands for OpenMediaVault See here www.openmediavault.org

Basically, this project has been a single-handed project for much of its early development by Volker Theile.

A summary of what OMV aims are, is captured here from the website:

"OpenMediaVault is the next generation network attached storage (NAS) solution based on Debian Linux. It contains services like SSH, (S)FTP, SMB/CIFS, DAAP media server, RSync, BitTorrent client and many more. Thanks to the modular design of the framework it can be enhanced via plugins.

OpenMediaVault is primarily designed to be used in home environments or small home offices, but is not limited to those scenarios. It is a simple and easy to use out-of-the-box solution that will allow everyone to install and administrate a Network Attached Storage without deeper knowledge."

For those of us used to a great Open Source NAS system - we grew up on Freenas. This project however aims to take NAS to the next level - by basing the core of the system on Debian, rather than Freenas's use of FreeBSD. The potential for further development is massive and the community around OMV is very active in terms of testing and developing future plugins.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

RE: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

I'd like to say that TOR and Mozilla could be, just for the sake of privacy.

I don't see any benefit giving funds to ReactOS; would be better (IMHO) giving it to Wine.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Your post might be more meaningful to us, if you told us what FOSS stands for. For example, the acronym dictionary has 54 meanings for the acronym FOSS, 12 of them recent, and 42 more not recently used. How would we know which one you meant? But if I had to guess, I would guess that you meant Free and Open Source Software.

dashesy

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

I would say EFF,it is the free internet I would like my kids to have for the years to come.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

I nominate Diaspora* (http://diasporafoundation.org).

It's open source and community driven - and the only real federated alternative to social networking.

Réf.: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

You could consider donations :

sparkleshare http://sparkleshare.org/ (opensource dropbox alternative)
OwnCloud (opensource dropbox & google calendar alternative) http://owncloud.org/
Clipperz (open source online password manager) https://www.clipperz.com/beta/#
NoScript (well-known Firefox security add-on)

I agree with EFF, TOR, FSF... there are so many projetcs that deserve our support!

Cheers,
Eric

notriddle

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Agree that donating to Wine would be better than ReactOS.

And how about CyanogenMod? Especially if they add DDG as an optional search engine (hint hint). They also strip junk like CarrierIQ, and allow you to strip permissions from apps, for the privacy junkies.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

I'd like to nominate OneSwarm http://www.oneswarm.org/ for it's contribution to privacy preserving p2p.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

I'm against all of these donations towards encryption, darknets.. I mean privacy and security are great but projects that are hitting the mainstream would be more effective then say: crytp, tor. Instead projects like diaspora, dasycha.in, friendica these sorts of projects that are attempting to decentralize the web rather then float under the radar seem more important.

So a nice startup that is focusing on decentralization wins my vote (if it counts)

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Encryption has been mainstream since Zimmerman won his holy war in the 90s. Log into your bank account with a plain text stream on a public network (the Internet being the largest public network) and let me know how that works out for you in the long run. Truecrypt is the defacto industry standard. Even my mother uses it to store her financial information.

"Darknets" are just proxies, so please rethink your terminology. They are more mainstream than you think, so using "darknet" as a pejorative is not intellectually honest. Besides, the federated services you speak of rely heavily on these so called "darknets" for their backends. That says nothing about the modern censorship and surveillance state, which is beyond the discussion in this thread.

The problem with the federated services you mentioned is not cash, code or publicity (which they have received in massive flurries), its mind share. And there is nothing we can do about that from here.

just my two cents. take them with a grain of sodium chloride.
--
David Pierce

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Im going to go with OpenSSH (which is pretty critical to everything these days) and Perl which I know is pretty critical to DDG http://donate.perlfoundation.org/

Gryllida

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

"Perl which I know is pretty critical to DDG http://donate.perlfoundation.org/" <-- This. One thousant times, this.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Promote data portability project

Unhosted: http://unhosted.org/
(promo for Unhosted Libre Office: http://vimeo.com/21387223)

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

owncloud is supposed to be Unhosted-compatible

bee.keeper

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Using the Security Theme I would second the ideas of:

TOR

TruCrypt

Using a general computer related theme I would second the idea of:

Wine

I was thinking we could donate to an open source web browser dedicated to internet security and privacy. We could donate to Firefox, but I was hoping to find a web browser completely dedicated to internet security and privacy. Surely there is one out there, that I am totally missing. Firefox does take measures in this direction, but I don't think that this is their main purpose.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Wine already gets financial and commercial support from their parent company's sales of Crossover. Several distros (such as Canonical's Ubuntu) have begun pushing the commercial version pretty heavily lately in their stores. A lot of the FLOSS projects are backed by successful commercial entities to some extent. I think that should play heavily in decisions here.

Mozilla makes all their tens of millions (or at least a majority) from revenue agreements with Google and others and the terms of their revenue share is not always -- read: almost never -- transparent to the broader community. They have also ignored calls to add alternatives such as DDG, ixquick and others to their default lists. I do not believe we should be donating money to for profit corporations such as Mozilla. Especially ones whom are at direct ideological and financial odds with DDG, and an unholy alliance with The Competition™.

--
David Pierce

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Truecrypt is not free or open source (FSF and OSI definitions), Red Hat's lawyers also do not accept it.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems#TrueCrypt

The TrueCrypt software is under a poor license, which is not only non-free, but has the potential to be actively dangerous to end users or distributors who agree to it, opening them to possible legal action even if they abide by all of the licensing terms, depending on the intent of the upstream copyright holder. Fedora continues to make efforts to try to work with the TrueCrypt upstream to fix all of the issues in their license so that it can be considered Free, but have not yet been successful.

Fedora Suggests: Avoid this software entirely.

tcplay is an independently developed TrueCrypt-compatible program under the BSD license. A tcplay package has been submitted for package review for possible future inclusion in Fedora.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

These assumptions were made on a very old version of The License. They have since released a patch to this bug, as it were.

http://www.truecrypt.org/legal/license

FSF nor the OSI are the arbiter or Gods over all code. They're political organizations. The "CrimethInc. N©! license" is not FSF compatible either. Almost half of the Creative Commons Licenses would fail this test because they contain non-commercial, no deriv clauses. BSD while open and permissive, is still technically not "Free" according to the FSF zealots. "TrueCrypt-compatible" raises security concerns, much like the Debian SSL fiasco. TrueCrypt is "Open" and "Free" enough.
--
Pierce

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

The Free Software Foundation considers the BSD licenses free.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ModifiedBSD

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#clearbsd

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD

The ORIGINAL BSD LICENSE with advertising clause is free, but not GPL compatible:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OriginalBSD

I hope this clarifies things.

The FSF's concerns are that since the permissive licenses are not copyleft, there's no guarantee that they will remain free. Companies like to take permissively licensed code and make nonfree forks all the time. It's what went on with OS X. The FSF's position is that they aren't in the business of giving handouts to companies that want to take what they can and give nothing back. They have never said that permissive licenses are not free. If you can cite where they have, please link to that. :)

Mithrandir

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Wikipedia would definitely be a good choice; so would Perl and Python.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Good suggestions so far, and i'm going to +1 for Diasporafoundation. The effort needs to keep going. Decentralized, federated web ftw.

Etjaark

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Here is my top 4 (focused on privacy) :

Mozilla
Wikipedia
TOR
and the why not the Diasporaproject ? :)

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Wikipedia keeps on asking money, maybe they oughta replace the pleading add with addwords?
Mozilla's getting crappier.
Diaspora recently sent a letter saying we love you, give us money. Whaa? Wasn't it gonna be free? Kinda wikipedaish. Seems like that project's never gonna see the light of day.

TOR is a fine candidate for those 10% imho.
So is OpenSSH.
LUKS maybe?
EFF? GNU?

So are some distros like Debian or OpenBSD.

eet_fuk

Réf.: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

I think donating money is not always the best way to help open source projects. Most of the time they need developer time and general public attention more than money (yes I know you can buy them).

BUT, if I where to donate money, I would definitely go to PyPy progress to support Python 3, they have made an incredibly amazing (and huge) work to improve the performance of the Python interpreter (while the official CPython is already damn fast), and unlike some other projects they have clearly stated and planned how they would use the money to progress.

Réf.: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Most of them use the cash to pay hosting, personal bills or put bounties on bugs/feature requests. It is a way of giving back after we have taken so much and allows them to hack full-time or more than they normally would have out of the goodness of their hearts. It actually helps a lot.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

The fact that ReactOS is going nowhere has little to do with funding. It has more to do with the proprietary and undocumented and/or incorrectly documented nature of Windows, which they are attempting to clone.

POSIX is easy enough to implement that there are literally dozens of operating systems with decent compliance, even Mac OS X.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

OpenBSD/OpenSSH

Perl

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Regarding support for ReactOS and Wine I think it is a wrong signal to use a FOSS donation for software with the sole purpose of running nonfree Windows binaries in a GNU/Linux or similar environment.

I second David's thoughts regarding Mozilla. They get a huge part of their funding from Google and do not even put DDG in as a default search engine. I'm happy that they have money to continue their work (even though I personally don't want Google in my life) but a donation from DDG does not make much sense in this situation.

I said TOR project before but would also support the mentioned Perl and OpenSSH.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

I totally agree with you about Wine/non-free software and Mozilla/Google.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

I vote Trisquel GNU/Linux, a 100% Free (as in Freedom) Ubuntu-based GNU/Linux distribution.

There are hundreds of GNU/Linux distributions, but only 9 of these are free. The world needs Freedom!

makronized

R: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

DuckDuckGo is coded in Perl and JavaScript with help of YUI, served via nginx, FastCGI and memcached, running on FreeBSD and Ubuntu via daemontools. We both run our own servers and have servers on EC2. We use PostgreSQL+bucardo, CDB, Solr, BerkelyDB, S3 and flat files for data. We monitor via Server Density, our own scripts and DNSMadeEasy (which we also use for DNS and failover). Finally, we have some side components that use prosody, Debian, ejabberd,jQuery, node, python and even more Perl with lots of CPAN Distributions. Also check out this architecture post, which is somewhat out of date but largely accurate.

Hmm, so why don't you support Perl, nginx, postgresql, python, debian or other tools used by DDG?
This is quite common in IT: people support what they use.

jonerworm

R: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Good idea, but it would be important to balance it with donations to other projects that would produce correlated benefit.
Maybe more than 90% of FOSS employed by entities capable of donating is a web server, a database server, a programing language, and that's it! BUT these projects might not represent not more than 1/3 (I'm beeing conservative!) of FOSS software. Imagine all other FOSS software making up for the infra-structure envolved in a DDG business.

Good ideia of yours! I agree with you, but maybe 50%? The other half, make a voting on the web (FOSS solution!), and we can transparently give our opinnion.

Regards!

AGreenEar..

R: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Last year the FOSS donations were half things that DuckDuckGo uses and half suggestions from the community.

Moderator

R: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

I'd like to nominate Diaspora* and Identi.ca

makronized

R: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

I'd support Piwik, an open source alternative to Google Analytics.
While this is not strictly inherent to privacy and security, its usage will prevent developers and users from giving stats to Google for "free".

babarv

Réf.: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

+1 for:

TOR
FSFE

jonerworm

RE: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

PLEASE!!!! MAKE IT TRANSPARENT AND ORGANISED, OR ELSE WHAT'S THE POINT IN POSTING UNACCOUNTABLE (Guests) REQUESTS FOR DONATIONS?

Use some voting service (FOSS, plz)

MAIN POINT SEEMS TO ME:

I) Would DDG like to set apart something to donate for mission critical software? 100%? How much?

DDG employed: Debian, Perl, Python (PyPy?), ngnix, postgresql

II) Others so far: - if any $ left after DDG decide on slice of donation to be made in item I)

Clipperz
CyanogenMod
Diaspora
Identi.ca (Status.net?)
EFF
dasycha.in
friendica
FSF
FSFE
I2P
Linux Foundation
Linux Mint
LuaJIT
LUKS
Miro
Mozilla
NetBSD
NoScript
OMV
OneSwarm
OwnCloud
OpenBSD
OpenSSH
Piwik
ReactOS
sparkleshare
TAILS
tcplay
Tor
Trisquel
TrueCrypt
Unhosted
Wikipedia
Wine
YaCY

Sorry, if I missed any item!

jonerworm

RE: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

ALSO VERY IMPORTANT:

DDG should define its understanding of "FOSS": FSF+OSI??? Or any other sensu lato?

Sensu Stricto:

Free Software = GNU/Free Software Foundation
Open Source = Open Source Initiative

RE: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

We will be donating our allotment to stuff we use. This piece (that this discussion is based off of) doesn't have to directly relate to what we use, though I think it would be good to relate us generally, e.g. privacy, search, etc.

RE: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Open to suggestion, but my thought would be take sort of an open approach here and include anything open source or that which supports open source initiatives (like the EFF) even though they may not be themselves producing OSS.

AGreenEar..

RE: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Status.net is the open source program behind Identi.ca. Of the two, you want to donate to Status.net.

Moderator

rafaelluik

RE: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

People, the big names have already enough money and visibility to get donations, let's choose something smaller as noted in the previous year's donation thread...

I don't know many, I actually didn't think of it when I first read this topic but I'd suggest Dabr.

RE: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Yes, agree. We have limited funds, it would be good to do things that actually made a big difference or at least had the potential for significant ROI.

AGreenEar..

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Sorry for not forking last year's topic earlier - Yegg beat me to it.

Moderator

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

TrueCrypt except if they are seen as too big...

onefootin..

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Just to say - that was me above, did not realise I am posting as a guest., ie TrueCrypt.

Mithrandir

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

There have been some concerns made about the identity of the TrueCrypt authors. The licensing of the program is also controversial.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

The Bitcoin and i2p devs use pseudonyms too. It's part of their (crypto) culture that goes back to the CypherPunks mailing list in the late 80s. "Frank" in the wiki entry is not a notable source, and wrong on so many counts. Like CIA instead of NSA. That's not the CIA's style. NSA would just attack the thing (side channels, timing, etc) not backdoor it. That's a bit outside the scope of discussion here... I digress.

Licensing is not that big of a deal for others like Mandriva or Gentoo (whom arguably pour over the code more than most) PCBSD etc etc.

I will withdraw my initial nomination for them since many seem to take exception with their development style.

How about something a little less contentious like Midori then? We support an underdog (err... under cat?) and feed back into DDG's revenue stream at the same time because they're a browser and they also have DDG in their default lists. Win/win for everyone.

--
David Pierce

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Just to say thanks to those that nominated Clipperz!

I just would like to add that if we get any money we will use it not just to improve our password manager, but also to release a better, richer and more flexible Javascript Crypto Library.

Our goal is to make it easier for FOSS projects to use robust cryptographic algorithms in their Javascript code.

For this same reason we are also considering applying a more liberal license than AGPL to the library.

Any input on this matter is welcome.

Thanks again,

Marco

Btw, I really do like the DuckDuckGo privacy policy! :-)

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

Just to say that the comment above is from me: Marco Barulli, co-founder of Clipperz.

I'm happy to provide any further details on our plans for Clipperz.

And you can reach me here: marco at clipperz dot com.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

hello marco, mind if i ask a question about your project?

how would a sane person ever want to store passwords in "the cloud"?

i'm not trying to offend you and i'm not trolling, it's just that the idea seems completely absurd to me, so i seriously ask me (and you) this question. the js crypto library sounds interesting btw.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

I'm not taking any offense. :-)

Clipperz is a strange beast, a self-proclaimed "zero-knowledge web app" (others prefer to use the term "host-proof app"). It just means that Clipperz knows nothing about its users and their data. Not even their usernames!

And this result can be achieved thanks to browser cryptography, i.e. the ability of any Javascript-enabled browser to perform cryptographic computation with decent speed and no hassle for the user.

A rough description of this paradigm can be found here: "Anatomy of zero-knowledge web application".

You may also be interested in this quite old blog post: "Freedom and privacy in the cloud: a call for action".

Clipper is offering its online password manager service since 2007. We are currently storing almost a million passwords. Never had a single problem.

And if you don't trust our service (quite acceptable) you can run your own private instance of Clipperz on your own server by installing the AGPL licensed Community Edition.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

clipperz

scepticra..

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

I agree, given that the founder took the time to actually come to a comment thread and explain his service/thank those users who'd already promoted it and seems quite easily accessible, Clipperz is a good idea, especially if a more liberal license it applied! :)

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

i thnk you guys shold consider these ones reactos http://www.reactos.org/en/foundation_donate.html , linux mint http://linuxmint.com/donors.php , libreoffice - http://www.libreoffice.org/get-involved/donate/

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

I would like to see some money donated to the following:

Libreoffice
Gnu Free Call/Ekiga or other Skype alternative that is open source
VLC Media Player

dgmurdock..

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

i would like to see these

reactos
Libreoffice
Jitsi/Ekiga or other Skype alternative that is open source
VLC Media Player

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

4 months ago

My top picks are:

Wikipedia
Identi.ca ( or Status.net)
Midori ( It introduced me to DDG, need I say more? Support this little browser.)
Abiword
VLC
FreeBSD ( because BSD is Linux's poor cousin that never gets nearly the attention and support it deserves)

The reason I didn't list projects like Mozilla and the Linux Foundation is because I think they already get enough funding, and thus it wouldn't make that much of a difference. Supporting smaller projects with less funding could make a bigger difference for them.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

I am reluctant to give a thumbs up for http://www.reactos.org/ because there is a real danger that in near future MS guys may KO the project stating that they have infringed about this and that and what not

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

There is no real nor imminent danger in Microsoft taking them on. That would be a disaster and EFF would be all over it. Stop spreading FUD. Besides, even if there were, more the reason to arm their war chest.

--
Pierce

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

Regarding ReactOS, their sole purpose is to free people from the Microsoft Windows prison by constructing an identical prison for them to run nonfree Windows software and nonfree Windows drivers on.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

The point being that it's an open source environment. There are open-source Windows programs too, y'know, if necessary. As for drivers, yeah, sadly they would be, but they can be even on Linux (see: ATI/Nvidia drivers).

My vote goes for ReactOS.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

reactos!

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

OpenSSH
Freenet
EFF
Perl

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

Gnome!

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

arch linux

https://www.archlinux.org/

openssh

http://openssh.org/

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

I think it would be nice to spend a bit of that money sponsoring meaningful but smaller, one man projects like the improval of SBCL's threading by Nikodemus.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

I would much like a donation to the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia is easily the largest volunteer-run project on the internet, with far more man-hours put into it than the Linux kernel for instance.

There are several changes being made to Wikimedia infrastructure. One of the problems is how slow the service is in Asia for instance. In Indonesia, it can take even 30 seconds to get a change edited in in an article.

Imagine your life without Wikipedia. It's an integral part of the internet and this is reflected nowhere better than in the DuckDuckGo search engine where the box at the top almost always has an enwiki link. And wikis are huge in general, with most websites running on the Wikimedia-developed (but open source, naturally) MediaWiki, including the notable Wikia which is a commercial venture by Jimmy Wales.

Such a donation would definitely help with popularity among Wikipedians (and others, like Wiktionary which is what I mostly contribute to) who are very ethics-conscious among other thing and would certainly increase uptake of both DDG amongst the community but also FOSS, because the WM Foundation has done lots of work for it and continues to do so.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

I am of the idea of investing into an alternative to JAVA since its use is being restricted due to a change in the licence from what I hear. This alternative is openJDK which is the open-source version of Java.

I do not think donating money to individual distributions is a good investment since there are so many. Who do you donate to? Who is more worthy than the next distro.? Also I do not understand why some people still hanker about Wind compatibility. Linux is Linux and there is enough compatibility in most areas thanks to Linux application developers. If people are interested in PC games they should get a Wind machine however for everything else use Linux. We do not need a Wind clone, Linux related developers should be innovation.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

Every nomination should receive money, they are all great and important! :)

I nominate www.universalsubtitles.org

Cheers

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

I nominate Openvista. Im not sure how much has been donated but its a pretty big project but not as popular. Its hospital software/clinic.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

I was thinking it would be most useful to help a project that is not a downstream. What would be very useful for all platforms is a very high quality open source office suite. So how about the funding heads towards Libreoffice and the Document Foundation?

http://www.libreoffice.org/
http://www.documentfoundation.org/

omnireso

Réf.: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

Hello,

I will go for the following :

Tor
Diaspora / Status.net
Perl

Thus, taking care of both security, privacy and stand alone bits of networks solutions, plus the programing language that's behind Duck Duck Go !

psybermon..

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

I would like to nominate FreeBSD Foundation (http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/). FreeBSD Foundation is the organization that supports the developer and development for FreeBSD related activities. An excerpt from the web site :

The FreeBSD Foundation will support both the development and the popularization of FreeBSD, the world's best open source operating system. Here are some of the projects that the Foundation can and will support in the future:

Development of software for FreeBSD to benefit the user and developer community, including contract development of critical system infrastructure, porting of closed source applications such as Java(TM).
Obtaining computers and other equipment for developers to use toward improving FreeBSD, such as the network performance cluster, FreeBSD.org cluster, and personal development systems for developers.
Providing additional Internet infrastructure to aid in the development and distribution of FreeBSD.
Support developer communication and coordination, including financial support for developer summits and developer travel.
Encouraging the formation of FreeBSD user groups.
Cultivating press coverage and advertising the utility and availability of FreeBSD.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

Until we can purchase entirely open platforms we are vulnerable to control, coercion, and security threats we cannot counter because they are built into the infrastructure beneath our projects. Therefore I nominate:

1) launch or support viable open hardware projects
2) coreboot (http://www.coreboot.org/Welcome_to_coreboot)
3) Spark (http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2012/01/reveal.html)

Most, if not every single project mentioned above is built on these lower layers. Our security, our livelihoods, the very option of running alternate projects depend on these few things. They are too important to continue ignoring. As attacks on our freedoms creep lower and lower into our machines (ie- locked BIOS code, UEFI, etc) and we must build alternate infrastructure and develop sources to fuel these devices of freedom, lest we lose our free culture entirely.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

ReactOS

It would be great if they finally get some funding because they are working really hard with very little resources. Also it would be nice to have a windows like free operating system with a centralized softwarecenter ;) To speed up their work I would donate it to the ReactOS Project.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

I vote for Tor because as governments, even democratic ones, become more and more intrusive and surveillance the norm, privacy should be one of our main concerns.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

Ugh, discussions like these don't allow me to lurk properly.

I recommend Tor.

I would not like to see donations go to Diaspora.

I don't think I can +1 Tor and -1 Diaspora, but I'd like to.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

ReactOS, it's come leaps and bounds lately and if it got more funding it could go even further.

https://duckduckgo.com/Haiku_(operating_system)

justin.jq..

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

+1 for haiku

bee.keeper

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

3 months ago

I thought I could make a chart to help illustrate to everyone what is nominated and how many votes it has.

But that one is kind of confusing, so I took out all of the nominations with only one vote.

It can still be a little confusing, but that comes with so many suggestions.

I hope I didn't mess up to badly in recording the data.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

2 months ago

don't take it personally, but that chart is pretty useless. there were a lot of guest comments nominating things, and other people will not have posted anything, because their favourites were already nominated by somebody else. how do we know the reactos-postings were not all done by the same person, for example?

bee.keeper

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

2 months ago

True, there are a lot of guests posting, and nobody knows if they are the same person. Plus one can always create multiple user accounts, if they really wanted to. So, I want to expand on your comment, guest, and ask a question to who ever knows the answer. How will DDG decide who the community wants to donate to?

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

2 months ago

Like last year, we are taking the nominations as suggestions. We would like to concentrate on a theme, and also donate to places where our donation would really make a difference (bang for the buck). Any suggestions that would help us organize around these lines would be greatly appreciated.

rafaelluik

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

2 months ago

I think the forum platform may allow moderators to check users' IPs or something like that?

About how DDG will decide...

Well, I think this thread is like suggestions we're making to inspire them and in the end they'll choose some from the suggestions, some not posted here that they already know, maybe related to privacy, etc. If it works that way it's fine.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

2 months ago

Donations made! Check out the details at: http://ye.gg/foss2011

Thank you all for contributing to such a great thread.

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

2 months ago

Nice, I see Freenet wasn't forgotten even though surprisingly nobody mentioned it in this thread

I'm also discovering Unhosted and Friendica. Interesting stuff. :)

patheticc..

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

2 months ago

Looks like my previous comment got eaten by some piece of Javascript... and anyway I had yet again forgotten to log in (again, without even realizing it).

Anyway, all I was saying was I'm glad to see Freenet wasn't forgotten, as strangely enough it wasn't mentioned here along Tor, I2P and such.

scepticra..

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

2 months ago

Not mentioned, right?

patheticc..

Re: FOSS 2011 donation nominations

1 month ago

Oh, well spotted. I guess I missed it then ^^ Still, mentioned not as much as I2P (yeah, this time I did a text search on the thread

)