Funding open-source software
Software sits on the shoulders of giants.
Buttondown is a tool that simply would not exist without the gargantuan effort of many, many open-source projects, the vast majority of which are drastically underfunded relative to the value they provide.
I've committed to donating at least 10% of Buttondown's profits to the software that enables it. This is a relatively low number in absolute terms — I'm certainly not changing anyone's life — but I think it's still important.
(As of June 1, 2021, I'm still looking to donate $95. If I can't identify any relevant projects by the end of the month, I'll bump up existing donations.)
| Name | Category | URL | Amount | Since |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Django | Backend | https://www.djangoproject.com/foundation/donate/ | 100 | 6/1/2019 |
| Django Rest Framework | Backend | https://fund.django-rest-framework.org/topics/funding/ | 50 | 7/1/2019 |
| PyPI | Backend | https://psfmember.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=13/ | 50 | 2/1/2020 |
| Vue | Frontend | https://opencollective.com/vuejs/ | 50 | 3/1/2020 |
| core-js | Frontend | https://opencollective.com/core-js/ | 25 | 1/1/2021 |
| iPython | Backend | https://numfocus.salsalabs.org/donate/index.html | 25 | 4/1/2020 |
| Webpack | Frontend | https://opencollective.com/webpack/ | 25 | 3/1/2021 |
| iTerm 2 | Productivity | https://www.patreon.com/gnachman/ | 25 | 11/1/2020 |
| Storybook.js | Frontend | https://opencollective.com/storybook | 20 | 9/1/2020 |
| Prettier | Frontend | https://opencollective.com/prettier | 10 | 4/1/2020 |
| ESLint | Frontend | https://github.com/sponsors/eslint | 5 | 5/1/2020 |
| Homebrew | Productivity | https://github.com/sponsors/Homebrew | 4 | 5/1/2020 |
(The final tally: since the start of this initiative, I've donated $5,982 to projects relevant to Buttondown's success. That's not that much, and yet it is much more than many companies ten times as large as Buttondown.)