Supporting developers on Patreon (and similar)

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.

Red Hat Graphics team looking for another engineer

So our graphics team is looking for a new Senior Software Engineer to help with our AMD GPU support, including GPU compute. This is a great opportunity to join a versatile and top notch development team who plays a crucial role in making sure Linux has up-to-date and working graphics support and who are deeply involved with most major new developments in Linux graphics.

Also as a piece of advice when you read the job advertisement remember that it is very rare anyone can tick all the boxes in the requirement list, so don’t hesitate to apply just because you don’t fit the description and requirements perfectly. For example even if you are more junior in terms of years you could still be a great candidate if you for instance participated in GPU related Google Summer of Code projects or just as a community contributor. And for this position we are open to candidates from around the globe interested in working as remotees, although as always if you are willing or interested in joining one of our development offices in either Boston-USA, Brisbane-Australia or Brno-Czech Republic that is a plus of course.

So please check out the job advertisement forSenior Software Engineer and see if it could be your chance to join the worlds premier open source company.

The Steam Machines has arrived! And you should get one!

So yesterday, the 10th of November, was the official launch day of the Steam Machines. The hardware are meant to be dedicated game machines for the living room taking advantage of the Steam ecosystem, to take on the Xbox One and PS4.

But for us in the Linux community these machines are more than that, they are an important part of helping us break into a broader market by paving the way for even more games and more big budget games coming to our platform. Playing computer games is not just a niche, it is a mainstream activity these days, and not having access to games on our platform has cost us quite a few users and potential contributors over the years. I have for instance met a lot of computer science students who ended up not using Linux as the main operating system during their studies simply due to the lack of games on the platform. Instead Linux got de-regulated to that thing in a VM only run when you needed it for an assignment.

Steam for Linux and SteamOS can and will be important pieces of breaking through that. SteamOS and the Steam Macines are also important for the Linux community for another reason. They can help funnel more resources from hardware companies into Linux drivers and support. I know for instance that all the 3 major GPU vendors have increased their Linux drivers investments due to SteamOS.

So I want to congratulate Valve on the launch of the first Steam Machines and strongly recommend everyone in the community to get a Steam machine for their home!

People who have had a good chance to test the hardware has recommended me to get one of the Alienware SteamOS systems, so I am passing that recommendation onwards.

As a sidenote we are also working on a few features in Fedora Workstation to make it a better host for Steam and Steam games. This includes our work on the GL Dispatch and Optimus support as covered in a previous blog and libratbag, our new library for handling gaming mice under Linux. And finally we are working on a few bug fixes in Fedora to make it an even better host for the Steam client related to C++ ABI issues.