Help Me Collect Financial Statistics Of The Libre Community
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We have a money problem!
Libre projects, such as Libre Software ( GNU / Linux, Blender, the Fediverse ), or other Libre projects ( David Revoy's Pepper & Carrot comics, Blender Foundation's Open Movies, or @Ozoned 's Fireside Fedi ) are relying pretty much on donations to stay afloat.
I discussed the costs / donations income with Jerry from infosec.exchange and the picture is not good. Most of the Libre projects are barely alive financially, and those that are alive, are bordering on poverty for the people involved in them.
Take for example something I have personal experience with, my movie Moria's Race and it's game sequel. Those are two gargantuan projects that took all the time in the world to make. Yet because being relatively unknown I had to maintain a minimum wage job on the side, which I could only participate in part time, to have time to work on the projects.
At this current stage, developing Dani's Race I either need to kill myself with energy drinks and sleep below 6 hours a day; have barely any money, which makes my life miserable; or risk having the project be completely forgotten for the lack of updates about it.
What I'm trying to say here, there is real work that goes into making those Libre Projects. GNU / Linux is not a joke. It's not something that was done in a bedroom by one person who had nothing better to do. It was a multi-decade long collaboration of a lot of people.
But then there are projects like Pepper & Carrot by David Revoy which are pretty much a sole endeavor of one person. A comic-book is an art piece, that would not make much sense to be done collaboratively. Yet David Revoy understood the evils of releasing that comic-book any other way but Libre. Which means, he too is at a mercy of the readers to keep himself afloat.
Would be cool to know how well everybody is doing. And not just now. But it would be nice to keep track of how well everybody is doing at any given moment in time. And be able to make strategies based on that data.
What I want from you?
If you are running a Libre project and / or know somebody who does. And that Libre project has a way for donations to come in. Please make the data about your financials accessible in a machine readable way.
I made this page on my website.
As you can see I list 3 entries: BT Free, myself and the FSF. Each of them having a progress bar. And at the top you can see the average of all those progress bars, which is estimating how healthy the Libre Community is.
I want more entries there.
For this to work, my website needs to be able to get this data from places. @Ozoned ( from BT Free ) provided me with a direct API call for the platform he uses for donations. Which was not the best idea, the source code for plugin is publicly available and I had to go through hoops to conceal the API key. Other people might get access to the account with that key. I'd rather have @Ozoned host a simple JSON file somewhere where I can get just the data I need for the progress bar.
The FSF bar was a bit better. They have a file which you can get, showing the current number of on their current goal. Still I need to go there and manually change the goal if they change their campaign, which is not good.
A good thing would be something like this:
{ "goal":10000, "reached":5000, "currency":"$", "from":"2025/01/01" "to":"2025/02/01" }
This is a JSON formatted thing that has data I can use. It has the start and the end of the current campaign. It has the goal. It has the currently reached number. And it has an indication of what unit of measurement the goal is using. As in, what currency.
How to make that work?
If you are using any platform with an API, you should be able to get the data from that API about the current state of the money. Which means you should be able to write a simple script, which would do that periodically, maybe once a day, or so. And generate a JSON file similar to the one I showed above.
If you don't have an API but know, for example, the monthly income you are getting, with a little bit of math, you should be able to estimate how much you are making right now. Maybe you could add
"esitmated":true into the JSON, so I would know to render it appropriately.
If you don't have a web-server for this file, you can simply use GIT to host it as a part of the project's repository, or as a separate repository. GIT services such as Codeberg allow you to even make a simple static webpage where you can put JSON files. Which your script could update automatically running a
git push command every once in a while.
Then my server can collect data from all those JSONs and use that data to estimate the health of the community as a whole. And also provide people who are looking to whom to donate some information about it.
Please do that, or if you know somebody that might do that, help them to do that. So we could have a chance to finally solve the money problem.
Happy Hacking!!!
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