Making changes in the FOSS community, one step at a time

Aug 2, 2015 19:44 GMT  ·  By

The Ubuntu MATE project does something very admirable each month. Its makers contribute financially to other open source projects that are being used in the operating system, and that is something that doesn't happen all that often in the FOSS universe.

Users of open source software need to keep in mind that most of the work that's being done is not usually remunerated. If we take the Linux kernel out of the equation (it's a different situation there), then we have a myriad of projects built by people in their own time and at their own expense.

Many of them receive donations for their work, but no one is living like kings from donations. Most of the time, it's just enough to pay for server bandwidth and maybe some hardware. Ubuntu MATE is one of the projects that draw some donations, so it's able to share a portion of that money with other developers.

Ubuntu MATE funds are shared transparently

Another very important aspect of the Ubuntu MATE project is that Martin Wimpress releases details about all the money that are funneled into the operating system, which means everyone knows what's happening with their donations. This month, a couple of developers from the Debian and MATE mate projects have received donations, along with the Syncthing.

"Although Ubuntu MATE 15.04 onward is an official member of the Ubuntu family, and new Ubuntu MATE releases are now distributed via the Canonical mirror network, we are serving ~500 downloads per day for Ubuntu MATE 14.04 and another ~1000 downloads per day for Ubuntu MATE for the Raspberry Pi 2. Given that we have committed to support Ubuntu MATE 14.04 until 2019 these donations are much appreciated and help cover the bandwidth costs and fund the development servers we need to prepare new .iso images for Ubuntu MATE 14.04," said Martin Wimpress, the leader of the project.

These are no big sums of money, but this is not about who's donating the most. In fact, if more developers considered doing the same thing, maybe there would be much more interest from people who are normally working in their time off.