Thoughts

I live in Bordeaux, in a region that was recently struck by wildfires. The fire didn't get to the city center, but the news coverage, the scale of the fires, the work of the firefighters, the number of relief shelters and volunteers finally inspired me to do something I had my mind on for a while: giving money to charity.

And so I set up a monthly to donation to the French firefighters association, Oeuvre des Pupilles.

Donating to charity, and also to open source projects in particular, is something that had been on my mind for years. In fact, I've long believed that if more people adopted this business model, we could have a more robust open source ecosystem, and thus a safer and better world. However, I must admit that, deep ddown until this point, I still considered it as giving money away “for nothing”. Donating to the firefighters' association was the breakthrough I needed.

I've since set up additional monthly donations to several projects that I find important and interesting: Joplin, KeePassXC, OrganicMaps, and OurWorldInData. In total, I am donating around 40 EUR per month. I call this contributing financial power, but I also contribute brain power (reporting issues, participating in discussions, writing code, etc.) and CPU power (running background tasks on idle devices like my computer when I'm away or my home server). All details are available on my new “Beyond billable hours” page on my website.

The main takeaway of this post is simple: I believe in an open source world where projects can be sustained through voluntary support, and I believe in a world where everyone benefits from those projects regardless of their ability to contribute or finance them. Last words are: small contributions can make a big difference in the life of an open source project, so if you have the means, please support your favorite projects to allow them to live longer.

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