Have some extra cash? Help make your life easier

If you have some extra cash maybe you would consider donating some of it to one of the various open source projects that you likely use almost every single day? I know it is easy to forgot about where many of the things we use on a daily basis come from, but odds are that if you are reading this you probably use some kind of open source app. Where would you be without OpenSSH to securely connect to your servers? I know I’d personally be fucked without HAProxy doing the load balancing for many of the apps I’ve supported. What about Apache? Sure it might not be the hot tech now but how many of you have used it as your HTTP server both at work or for your personal site?

I could go on and on but the point I’m trying to make is that there are many (many!) tools that we use on a daily basis that someone (or a group of someones) are building, fixing and maintaining that make our lives easier. Some of these have big corporate sponsors but many of them do not. A lot of these people have other jobs they use to pay the bills and then work on their open source projects during their “off” time. Some groups build products, others focus on your rights (take the EFF for example). Others, like the Tor project, do both.

I encourage you to make a list of some of the open source tools you use on a daily basis and consider donating either money or time to those projects.