For some time now I been supporting two Linux developers on patreon. Namely Ryan Gordon of Linux game porting and SDL development fame and Tanu Kaskinen who is a lead developer on PulseAudio these days.

One of the things I often think about is how we can enable more people to make a living from working on the Linux desktop and related technologies. If your reading my blog there is a good chance that you are enabling people to make a living on working on the Linux desktop by paying for RHEL Workstation subscriptions through your work. So a big thank you for that. The fact that Red Hat has paying customers for our desktop products is critical in terms of our ability to do so much of the maintenance and development work we do around the Linux Desktop and Linux graphics stack.

That said I do feel we need more venues than just employment by companies such as Red Hat and this is where I would love to see more people supporting their favourite projects and developers through for instance Patreon. Because unlike one of funding campaigns repeat crowdfunding like Patreon can give developers predictable income, which means they don’t have to worry about how to pay their rent or how to feed their kids.

So in terms of the two Patreons I support Ryan is probably the closest to being able to rely on it for his livelihood, but of course more Patreon supporters will enable Ryan to be even less reliant on payments from game makers. And Tanu’s patreon income at the moment is helping him to spend quite a bit of time on PulseAudio, but it is definitely not providing him with a living income. So if you are reading this I strongly recommend that you support Ryan Gordon and Tanu Kaskinen on Patreon. You don’t need to pledge a lot, I think in general it is in fact better to have many people pledging 10 dollars a Month than a few pledging hundreds, because the impact of one person coming or going is thus a lot less. And of course this is not just limited to Ryan and Tanu, search around and see if any projects or developers you personally care deeply about are using crowdfunding and support them, because if more of us did so then more people would be able to make a living of developing our favourite open source software.

Update: Seems I wasn’t the only one thinking about this, Flatpak announced today that application devs can put their crowdfunding information into their flatpaks and it will be advertised in GNOME Software.