Open source donations for 2011

21 Mar 2011

bliss uses code from a number of open source projects. This makes it quicker to develop bliss, and because the open source projects have mature code it makes bliss more reliable than me reimplementing solutions myself.

So I decided it was only fair that not only should I contribute with bug reports and discussions on these projects (and the odd bit of promotion), I should provide a small financial donation. bliss is, after all, commercial software, so if I make some revenue I should share it with others who put the work in.

A number of projects, for instance Lift and JDBM would not even accept donations, even when I emailed them and asked to take elsten software's money! They preferred I evangalised or contributed to the community. This is not unexpected. After all, open source projects are often founded purely out of interest of the programmer members, a desire to steer a project with full autonomy and a want to contribute something of good to this world.

But a few projects did, so I donated roughly £100 each to JAudioTagger, IzPack and MusicBrainz. All of these projects have provided high quality code and great support when it was needed. Not a lot of money, but I am running a business and I'm sure every little helps!

Thanks to Dave Dugdale from PickRent for the image above.