Donate to Open Source Software This Holiday Season

Anyone who knows me knows how big of an advocate of Open Source Software that I am. I try to use and promote free and open source software (FOSS) whenever I can.

On Tuesday, December 13 my friend and colleague Ross Campbell, Art Director at Mosaic Studios tweeted:

this Xmas, I am buying or donating to all of the freeware, shareware and opensource applications that I use on a regular basis.

What a great idea! During the holiday season we all feel so generous. So many people give to worthy charities this time of year, but I haven’t heard stories of people spreading their generosity to their favourite free and open source projects. Don’t get me wrong, your favourite charities deserve your money, but so do the people who work, usually as a volunteer, to design, develop, test, document, and otherwise make all those great free and open programs we all love.

This tweet inspired me. Not necessarily to donate to the big open source projects like WordPress, Drupal, Ubuntu, Mozilla, etc (not that they’re any less deserving of donations) but to spread the Christmas spirit of spreading the wealth to those who need it most, and donate to some of the smaller projects. It’s the little applications that I use daily, and take for granted – like my FTP client, text editor, ID3 tag editor, time tracker, to do manager, media player, defragger, etc.

I am trying to donate to a different project every day until New Years Eve, and challenge you to do the same. Below is a list of the projects I’ve donated to so far this year, and I’ll be updating this list as needed:

[Updated December 27]

• Filezilla (FTP Client)
• Notepad++ (Text/Code Editor)
• VLC (Media Player)
• Audacity (Sound Editor)
• TrueCrypt (Disk Encryption)
• MP3Tag (MP3 ID3 Tag Editor)
• Google XML Sitemap Generator (WordPress Plugin)
• Contact Form 7 (WordPress Plugin)
• PHPMyAdmin (MySQL GUI)
• ImgBurn (CD/DVD Burning)
• CamStudio (Streaming Video Recording)
• Spybot S&D (Malware/Spyware Cleaner)
• Portable Apps (Portable Application Framework)
• UncleCheese (SilverStripe Plugin Developer)
• Firebug (In-browser web development tool)
• Super One Click Root (Android Root)
• Tortoise SVN (SVN Intereface)

If you’d like to follow my progress, or let the world know about your own donations to open source projects this holiday season, or spread the word about this idea we invite you to Tweet using the hash tag #xmasoss.  I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to hit me up on Twitter, Facebook or Google+, or leave a comment below.

If you’d like to join Ross and I on this quest, please leave a comment or get a hold of me and let me know that this idea has inspired you as well.  We’re glad to have you aboard!