We remain behind on our 2026 fundraising goals and are resetting our efforts to restore regular contributor support.
It’s been about a month since my last check-in, so it’s been a while.
Right after that last check-in a personal emergency put a lot of our activity on hold, which included putting our freelancers on hold, which turned out to be prolonged due to fundraising issues. In spite of this, our coverage did not suffer, mainly because the only writer we have left (raising my hand here) has been working overtime to make sure our readers get the coverage they’ve come to expect.
To be on schedule and to put our writers back to work, we need our fundraising total to be at $4,500, which would represent $1,000 monthly being raised since we started this effort on February 1. Instead, we’re sitting at $2,941, or $59 shy of what we needed to have in the bank at the end of April, nearly two months ago.
Resetting Mini Goals
What we’re going to do is reset the clock on our monthly minigoals.
The first mini goal should be easy, especially if you help us get the word out while helping with donations.
Our first goal is to raise $1,059 dollars by the end of July, which is 42 days away, which would put the FOSS Force 2026 Independence Drive at $4,000. After that, our mini goals will return to $1,000 monthly, which is the minimum we need to keep publishing.
Right now, we can pretty much figure that a little over 10% of that amount is automatic, as the fundraiser now has a little over $100 in donations that are pledged daily, which means that $900 in new donations gets us $1,000.
If you can afford to $10, $20, $30 or more on a monthly basis, that’s a big help, because the more money we have pledged on a monthly basis, the fewer new donors we have to find and motivate each month.
Why Does FOSS Force Deserve Your Support?
To answer that question, here’s what your support made possible in just the past month:
- Extensive coverage on the triple whammy of serious security exploits that began affecting Linux users in May. We had multi-article, in-depth coverage of Dirty Frag, Copy Fail, and Fragnesia as well as developer responses to them.
- Several articles on the open sourcing of Warp, the popular agentic AI platform for developers.
- Software Freedom Conservancy’s fight to make Bambu Labs bring its use of Linux in its 3D printers under compliance as a right‑to‑repair issue.
- Google’s bait and switch in the AI arena, when it ended support of its open source Gemini CLI and replaced it with paid and proprietary Antigravity CLI.
- A report on increased grass roots community involvement at Free Software Foundation.
- Reports on Colorado and California exempting Linux and other open source operating systems from age verification regulations.
- Numerous articles on European tech companies forking OnlyOffice to create Euro-Office in the name of digital sovereignty.
- A changing of the guard at Electronic Frontier Foundation, when the organization installed a new executive director.
- Numerous reports on a major malware incident concerning Arch Linux’s AUR user repository.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There was more. Much more.
If you would like for that coverage to continue, we need your help. If you think that the type of coverage that FOSS Force has become known for during our 16-year existence is important, and that our honest and in-depth articles are valuable to Linux, open source, and Free Software, we need you to make a donation now. Again, monthly donations to help sustain us is what we need the most, but if that’s not what you can do, please know that each and every one-time-only $5, $10, or $25 donation is a great help.
Please give now, and tell other open source users you know about out fundraiser.
With your help, we’ll be able to contact Larry, Jack, and others and get them back to work keeping you informed on what’s happening in the open source world.
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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