Thursday. December 18, 2025
A couple of days ago - in light of Mozilla (once again) doubling down in poor decision making - I was saying how it’s a good idea to donate to alternative projects instead, every time Mozilla fails us. But all joking aside, given the state of the world, it’s indeed a good time to support our best shots at maintaining independent software stacks. Servo as an alternative browser engine clearly fi…
Thursday. December 18, 2025
A couple of days ago - in light of Mozilla (once again) doubling down in poor decision making - I was saying how it’s a good idea to donate to alternative projects instead, every time Mozilla fails us. But all joking aside, given the state of the world, it’s indeed a good time to support our best shots at maintaining independent software stacks. Servo as an alternative browser engine clearly fits that need, but there’s many more. In an ideal world, in which we all had unlimited time, that could mean volunteering our time and expertise to those projects instead of giving money, but even in that ideal world, there’s a lot more software we all use than we can reasonably contribute to. So throwing some money their way is maybe a good next-best thing.
Over the past year and a half, I have moved a lot of my computing stack out of the hands of big tech into Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) alternatives. For that reason, I’ve tried shift the money I no longer have to hand over to those corporations at the FLOSS replacements I use and benefit from instead.1 And, to maybe inspire some others to do the same, I wanted to share some of those projects I’m supporting this year, especially as it’s the donation-giving time of the year in many places.
Some FLOSS infrastructure projects that have formed vibrant communities around them do not just accept donations, but enable people to become members of their associations, thus conferring voting rights. My favorite, community-based forge for collaborating on software, Codeberg (think “a community-owned GitHub-replacement exclusively for FLOSS software”), operates this way. Their membership fees enable the buying of the necessary hardware, paying the rack space rent, and a small set of paid, part-time staff to help with book keeping and admin work, while most of the human labor is done by volunteers. While there’s a minimum membership fee, there’s a pay what you can-possibility, e.g. allowing to support the lower fees for members who couldn’t afford the “regular” fees.
The OpenStreetMap Foundation operates on a similar membership basis. And both are doing a whole lot with their shoestring budgets. Which is why, in addition to volunteering a lot of my time for contributing, I’m happily a card-carrying, dues-paying member to both of these.
And speaking of OpenStreetMap, there are tons of OSM apps that I regularly use and which are all FLOSS too: CoMaps, Every Door and StreetComplete are some of my most-used apps, and each of them are fully generated by volunteers who can benefit from donations. And as I’m a regular uploader of street-level imagery to Panoramax, via the instance of the French OpenStreetMap chapter, I also benefit a lot from their efforts. Which is why I donate at least a bit to all of them.
Then there’s some of the basic communication and networking tools I use: My favorite instant messenger by far is still Delta.Chat, which is built on robust standards while providing decentralized communication that is specifically designed to not have a single point of failure. Which sets it apart from Signal, which also has great encryption (and a bigger user base in my circles, at least for now) but at the cost of being highly centralized. In terms of social networks, I virtually exclusively use Mastodon, via the scholar.social instance that’s my home. Additionally, for my book-related needs I’m using Bookwyrm.social. Given the ongoing costs for running infrastructure and the labor for both development work and handling content moderation, I happily support all of them.
And last, but definitely not least, there’s a lot of the other utilities that make my daily digital workflows possible: FreshRSS is a feed aggregator that can be self-hosted and can create full-text feeds even for websites that don’t offer any. Wezterm is my go-to terminal app in which I spend a good part of the day, including when writing these blog posts. Kiwix is an app that allows reading Wikipedia and other knowledge content offline, which is amazing for places where reception is not a given. And Rogue Scholar is the amazing platform that archives this blog and gives it DOI for long-term cite-ability.
This gives a bit of an idea which free (both as in speech and as in beer) & open source projects I rely on and that can use some support. A large number of them are made virtually exclusively as works of love by volunteers2, which makes supporting them even more relevant. Which ones did I maybe forget? And which ones are on your own list to distribute some “FLOSS Christmas presents” to? Let me know via Mastodon.
References
- Greshake Tzovaras, B. (2024, July 4). Seizing my means of computation. Bastian Greshake Tzovaras. https://doi.org/10.59350/yxk84-qee36
- Greshake Tzovaras, B. (2025, June 18). Power-sharing in online communities. Bastian Greshake Tzovaras. https://doi.org/10.59350/jpevj-h4y27
- Greshake Tzovaras, B. (2024, July 22). Code from some mountaintop. Bastian Greshake Tzovaras. https://doi.org/10.59350/2jngq-8fx12
- Greshake Tzovaras, B. (2025, August 11). The diversity of OpenStreetMap tools and how they help create a commons. Bastian Greshake Tzovaras. https://doi.org/10.59350/b6hse-mv263
- Greshake Tzovaras, B. (2024, August 23). Openly licensed streetview with Panoramax. Bastian Greshake Tzovaras. https://doi.org/10.59350/cjnzq-6cs79
- Greshake Tzovaras, B. (2024, September 10). Self-deploying more of my own small web. Bastian Greshake Tzovaras. https://doi.org/10.59350/3etx1-k5q13
- Greshake Tzovaras, B. (2025, September 1). Creating full-text RSS/Atom feeds for any page with FreshRSS. Bastian Greshake Tzovaras. https://doi.org/10.59350/2z5a5-4d945
Footnotes
At least for the FLOSS alternatives that need/can use donations, which isn’t all of them. For example, the Android podcast app AntennaPod asks their users to contribute their time if they can or donate to others instead, as their hosting etc costs are already covered. And other tools I frequently use, like Darktable, do not accept donations either. ↩ 1.
Others, like OSM or Codeberg have some small amount of paid staff, but still can only function because of orders of magnitude more volunteer labor. From the list here, only Signal and Kiwix really rely on paid staff to deliver their software (i think at least). ↩
Bastian Greshake Tzovaras
Generally, things are better if you put open* in front of them.
Thanks to Rogue Scholar, you can cite this blog post using the DOI https://doi.org/10.59350/wzs2w-v3j04.
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