On Our Way to Independence: Funding FOSS Force’s Next Year of Coverage

Our 2026 Independence Drive is moving, but more slowly than we’d hoped — here’s where things stand and how you can help us pick up the pace.

You may or may not know that FOSS Force is in the middle of a fundraising campaign on GoFundMe to raise $12,000 to cover costs for paying freelance writers for a year. That comes out to $1,000 monthly, and when we have that money raised we’ll have the expense of paying writers covered until March 1 of next year.

We’re calling our campaign the FOSS Force 2026 Independence Drive because it’s meant to help us cover open source for the benefit of users and those who practice in open source space instead of advertisers selling products. In other words, it’s meant to give both our site and our readers independence from the likes of Google. I say we’re “in the middle of” this campaign, because that’s where we hoped we’d be by now when we started it in early February. As it is, we’re just out of the starting gate.

We quickly raised the first $1,000, which covered our writer expenses for February. That’s good. We also fairly quickly raised more than half of the next $1,000, which will cover our writer expenses for the current month. The trouble is, we haven’t seen a donation in well over a week. Maybe that’s because we haven’t been bugging you enough about it. Maybe we need to go all NPR and start publishing a pledge break a couple of times an hour. Probably not. That works well for radio, but I’m pretty sure that it won’t work for a print site.

The total raised in our Independence Drive so far is $1,671, which is $329 short of the amount we “must have” by the end of the month. I posted about this on my social sites, and pointed out that we only needed to raise a very doable $25 daily to keep from falling behind on our minimum goals. Since then there have been no donations, so that number has risen to about $33 dollars a day. While that remains very much in reach, we need the daily-needed number to be getting smaller instead of larger.

I remain confident that we can do this. Give what you can. Post a link to this article, or any of the other articles we’ve already published by Carla Schroder, Dana Blankenhorn, Ken Starks, and our own Larry Cafiero — oh, and the video by Jack Wallen — explaining why your support of FOSS Force is important. The folks at GoFundMe keep reminding us that our biggest donor could very possibly be someone we know personally. It could also be someone you know, so please post to social and send emails about our drive to your friends.

And remember what it’s about: for over 15 years we’ve been keeping you informed about open source and free tech. With your help, not only will that legacy continue, we’ll be able to cover everything open even better.

The sooner we can meet our $1,000 goal for March (which will bring our total raised to $2,000), the quicker we’ll be able to start raising the next $1,000 to pay our writers at the end of April. And the sooner we can reach the entire $12,000 goal, which will fund our writers until the end of February 2027,the sooner we’ll be able to turn our attention to developing additional revenue streams that will keep us funded going forward without compromising our promise to report the truth, the whole truth… you know the rest.

In earlier articles during this campaign, we explained that several years ago we dropped all tracking ads from the likes of Google Ads. These days, the only ads you see on our site are from affiliate sponsors, who don’t pay us by the click or per 1,000 impressions, but pay us a commission should you purchase something. You also see ads from the open source company Nextcloud, who believes enough in what we do to sponsor us, not because we drive tons of business to them, but because they support us because we support open source. Other sponsors are coming, and all of them will be companies and organizations that are invested in open source and who will be supporting us to support us, not because they want to pick the pockets of our readers.

But first, we must cross this first hurdle and complete our effort to remain funded through the end of next February.

Please go to our FOSS Force 2026 Independence Drive on GoFundMe and make a donation. Contribute what you can, whether that be $5, $10, $25, or more. When you go to contribute, you’ll be offered the opportunity to make that contribution monthly. Choosing that option is a great help for us, because every dollar contributed monthly is a dollar we don’t have to worry about raising next month and the month after that.

We thank you for your support.

I’ll be back next Sunday to tell you how we’re doing.