The memories of a man in his old age
are the deeds of a man in his prime
— Free Four, Obscured by Clouds, Pink Floyd
I just donated to:
- the Wikimedia Foundation
- the OpenBSD project
and became:
- an associate of GNOME
- a subscriber of Krautreporter (who have the rest of today to complete their initial bootstrap)
Being involved in a project that is heavily driven by donations, I keep remembering myself of the importance of putting my money were my mouth is.
Some of these donations were triggered by recent events and initiatives in these projects. GNOME’s outreach for women program for example. Or OpenBSDs bold initiative in starting LibreSSL, which is doing what needed to be done and vitalizing an overlooked area of open source development. Watching them explain the status quo and how they are attacking it remembers me of LibreOffice — beyond the name. Plus, I dont want to be compared with a My little Pony character again.
Others are already working examples of the long tail, crowd funding and the meshed society (Wikipedia) or tailblazing to be one (Krautreporter) beyond the world of software. The latter might also have been influenced by one of the last wishes of a man that unexpectedly died way to early. May he rest in peace.
You can't take the sky from me. 
I tried to donate to the guy that did aqemu using his SourceForge Paypal setup and discovered how impossible Paypal has grown to be. I hadn’t checked Paypay in a while. The donation failed because of numerous errors from the Paypal site. He posted his Gmail address but I couldn’t send money via Google to another country outside of the US. It’s a shame that someone who was writing a nice KDE GUI for qemu (while libvirt does not allow pulseaudio so VMs have no sound) stopped working on it.