Our Independence Drive is at 17% of its total goal. A final $34 this month will fully fund our mini-goal for March’s coverage of Linux and open source.
Pretty good news on the fundraising front. During the last week our contributions picked up a bit, and we collected $295 through our GoFundMe fundraiser, which means readers like you have now contributed $1,966 to our FOSS Force 2026 Independence Drive since it started in mid-February. That’s 17% of our overall goal of $12,000, which is what it currently costs to pay our writers for a year. If we go over, that’s great, because we’ll be able to offer our writers more work and our coverage of Linux and open source will even get better.
The important thing is for us to continue to collect at least $1,000 a month, which keeps me — I’m wearing my publisher’s hat here — from having to dip into my retirement savings to cover the expense, which is something I can’t do anymore. Last week when I checked in with you, we had raised $1,671 towards our total goal, which put us $329 shy of what we needed to pay our writers for the month of March. Thanks to you, we’re now only $34 away from meeting that goal. That means, given that there are three days left in the month, we only need to raise a little over $11 daily to meet that goal, which shouldn’t be difficult.
Better still would be if we could keep the momentum we saw during the last seven days when you donated about $42 daily. If we could continue at that rate, we could end March not only having met our needs for the month, but with a head start of $92 towards meeting our April goal. If we maintain that rate going further, it would also mean we would meet our $12,000 goal in eight months, meaning we could close out November with our writers fully funded through the end of January, which would be a relief.
With these funds, we will be able to continue covering open source as we have been doing for 16 years.
During the last two weeks alone, in addition to offering reviews of Linux distributions and open source applications, we covered numerous news stories including:
- Changing leadership at Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Availability of livestreaming at the sold out All Things AI conference
- Membership growth at OpenSSF
- A Test Week at Fedora
- AlmaLinux Kitten supporting RISC-V
- System76’s new Thelio Mira line
- Germany’s federal “Deutschland-Stack” mandating Open Document Format
- A developers’ strike at Manjaro Linux
- A look at the Open Source Endowment’s chances for success
Let’s not stop at what we’ve already reported. Coming up this week, we’re already working on an article about a popular but controversial open source project that’s been forked by a coalition of European enterprises and community organizations. In addition, on Monday we’re publishing a guest article from a person who’s been an open source leader for longer than 20 years. He asks questions about open source and artificial intelligence that go beyond the usual how it should be licensed.
In addition to the stories we cover, almost every day there are other stories we would like to cover that we can’t, because we don’t have the staff to do so. With your help, we’ll be able to broaden our reporting beyond what we already cover.
As I mentioned last week, to help in this regard we are working on other avenues for keeping FOSS Force funded. We’re mainly doing this by developing partnerships with open source companies that benefit from a healthy open source ecosphere. We obviously think that the type of journalism we practice here is part of that.
If you work for a company whose primary business is open source related, please put a bug in management’s ear and let them know we’d love to have the opportunity to discuss tailoring a highly affordable sponsorship package specifically to meet the needs of your company. Contacting us is easy through our “Contact Us” form that can be reached through the menu just below our masthead.
Please donate. And if you can, please take advantage to GoFundMe’s “monthly” feature, to pledge an amount on a monthly basis. Any contribution helps, from $5 up.
Thanks to those of you who’ve donated so far, to all who will donate in the future, and to all who read our site.
I’ll be back next Sunday with another update.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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