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Bryan is a writer and works as the Social Media Marketing Manager of SUSE. On this blog, he seeks to highlight the coolest things happening in the Linux world.

Network World | Jan 23, 2017 9:19 AM PT

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Free and open source software is an absolutely critical part of our worldand the future of technology and computing. One problem that consistently plagues many free software projects, though, is the challenge of funding ongoing development (and support and documentation).

With that in mind, I have finally settled on a New Years resolution for 2017: to donate to one free software project (or group) every monthor the whole year. After all, these projects are saving me a boatload of money because I dont need to buy expensive, proprietary packages to accomplish the same things.

Im not setting some crazy goal herenot requiring that I donate beyond my means. Heck, some months I may be able to donate only a few bucks. But every little bit helps, right?

To help me accomplish that goal, below is a list of free software projects with links to where I can donate to them. Organized by categories, just because. Im scheduling a monthly calendar item to remind me to bring up this page and donate to one of these projects.

This isnt a complete listnot by any measurebut its a good starting point. Apologies to the (many) great projects out there that I missed.

elementary OS In addition to the distribution itself (which is based, in part, on Ubuntu), this team also develops the Pantheon desktop environment.

Solus This is a from scratch distro using their own custom-developed desktop environment, Budgie.

Ubuntu MATE Its Ubuntuwith Unity ripped off and replaced with MATE. I like to think of this as What Ubuntu was like back when I still used Ubuntu.

Debian If you use Ubuntu or elementary or Mint, you are using a system based on Debian. Personally, I use Debian on my PocketCHIP.

PulseAudio PulsAudio is all over the place now. If it stopped being supported and maintained, that would be highly inconvenient.

Gimp The GNU Image Manipulation Program is one of the most famous free software projectsand the standard for cross-platform raster design tools.

FreeCAD When people talk about difficulty in moving from Windows to Linux, the lack of CAD software often crops up. Supporting projects such as FreeCAD helps to remove that barrier.

OpenShot Video editing on Linux (and other free software desktops) has improved tremendously over the past few years. But there is still work to be done.

Blender What is Blender? A 3D modelling suite? A video editor? A game creation system? All three (and more)? Whatever you use Blender for, its amazing.

Inkscape This is the most fantastic vector graphics editing suite on the planet (in my oh-so-humble opinion).

LibreOffice / The Document Foundation I am writing this very document in LibreOffice. Donating to their foundation to help further development seems to be in my best interests.

Python Software Foundation Python is a great language and is used all over the place.

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom. We defend the rights of all software users.

Software Freedom Conservancy Software Freedom Conservancy helps promote, improve, develop and defend Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects.

Againthis is, by no means, a complete list. Not even close. Luckily many projects provide easy donation mechanisms on their websites.

Bryan is a writer and works as the Social Media Marketing Manager of SUSE. On this here blog, he seeks to accomplish two goals: 1) To be the voice of reason and practicality in the Linux and Open Source world. 2) To highlight the coolest things happening throughout the world of Linux.

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New Year's resolution: Donate to 1 free software project every month - Network World