full circle magazine #65

39

MY OPINION

channels, and this is how I do it.

And I use this software every day,

so it is a good candidate for

support. About a year ago they

were looking to sign up people in a

fund-raising drive called “Adopt a

line of code”, for which you would

pay $4 per month through PayPal.

It looked good to me, so I signed

up. After all, I get far more than $4

per month of benefit from this

software and have come to rely on

it every day.

• I also am a KDE user on all of my

computers. A few months back, I

saw a post from one of the

developers, Sebastian Trueg

(http://trueg.wordpress.com/),

that he needed to raise money to

support himself so he could

continue his work on KDE. Unlike

some of the developers, he had no

corporate paycheck supporting his

KDE work. Well, I use KDE every

day, I rely on it, and I clicked the

PayPal button for a donation (My

memory is that I gave him $10, not

a huge amount, but I hope that

among all of the KDE users he

raised enough money to keep

working.)

• My particular distro of choice is

Kubuntu, and, again, I use it every

day. I don’t think Canonical really

needs my donations to keep going,

but they base their work on

Debian, so when I saw a

fundraising drive to write and

publish the Debian System

Administrator ’ s Han d b o o k, I

pledged a small amount (again, I

think it was $10 or so. For me, $10

is the amount I can casually donate

without worrying about paying my

own bills.)

Another form of support you

can give is by joining some of the

Non-Profit charitable organizations

that support Free Software. There

are a number of them, but I will

note a few. First is the Free

Software Foundation

(http://www.fsf.org/). This was set

up by Richard Stallman, and is the

one organization on my list that is

directly focused on defending our

software freedoms. This is the

group that promotes the GPL

license. Because my own freedom

is very important to me, I am proud

to say that I am a member. This is a

little more expensive than my

donations above, at $10 per

month, but I’m glad to do it.

Another group that you can

support through a membership is

The Linux Foundation

(http://www.linuxfoundation.org/).

This group pays the salary of Linus

Torvalds (and just announced that

they are supporting Greg Kroah-

Hartman), so if the Linux Kernel is

your thing this would be a good

thing to join. Individual

memberships are $99 per year.

Next I want to mention the Linux

Fund (http://www.linuxfund.org/).

They raise money through what

are called “Affinity Cards”, i.e.

credit cards with a logo of your

favorite group. You many have

seen these before to support

sports teams or universities, but

you can support Free Software.

And despite that name “Linux

Fund” they also support BSD,

which is Free Software by any

definition. All you need to do is

sign up for a credit card through

them and a small part of your

purchases goes to support the

project you choose.

The last one I would like to

mention is the Software Freedom

Conservancy

(http://sfconservancy.org/). This is

a non-profit group headed by

Bradley Kuhn that helps a lot of

projects. Essentially, they provide

the legal structure to enable

smaller projects to raise money

while the SFC handles the

administrative overhead. Bradley

was formerly at the Free Software

Foundation, and is still the most

active person in defending the