Scratchmark is a great name! Concerning the Logo, your suggestions are nice but they might be too complicated. The Logo has to work when it’s tiny on your desktop etc. The more simple the better. Maybe a simple logo and the placing one of the suggestions in your UI somewhere would work? :-)

Haha. 🤣 Made my day

Tbh, I understand the problem. There are just so many volunteers for making newer developments work on every platform. Streamlining the development and easing the load on the volunteer devs seems a good idea. Having that said, it’s ofc a pity to drop support for devices. At least the LTS kernels will support the current support for a while and the vibrant Linux community will find a good way to work it out, I have no doubt. Many machines, in particular old ones, run with very old kernels to begin with…

That’s a great recommendation, thanks! The pay per use model seems very fair and I like their approach to sustainability matters very much.

Thanks! Will have a look

While I totally agree that this should be the case, I’m not sure it really works. Voluntary participation is among the first things to be cut when it comes to monetary gain maximization, and is often not even considered. And in some instances, like the publicly funded research institute I work at, there’s no funds dedicated to voluntary contribution to open source projects.

Schleswig-Holstein therefore follows the general strategy to move towards an open source driven administration. In fact, several federn institution already migrated to the openDesk administration bundle (https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/). Great!

The initiative to build FOSS alternatives for the administration in Europe goes back years. In a nutshell: Corporate software is getting very expensive for the administration and poses security risks. As an alternative, FOSS Software is put together to replace the administrative systems. The reason there is so many news now is that the first Software bundles are being released and are coming online in databases.

To give that more context: The BundesMessenger is developed for secure communication in the German army (named Bundeswehr in German). So it’s most likely not only about cash but also about security. It’s e2e encrypted, can be federated to several locations, etc. Seems a smart move to me. Edit: Actually I’m mistaken. It’s for the whole public administration. Not only the army. Not sure how I got that impression. Argument holds, though. 🙈

So and so. The projects I like a lot and heavily use I give 5€ a month, but there are very few. That would also be the usual member fee for instance for the Wikimedia foundation. Beyond that, it’s usually between a coffee and 20€, depending on how much potential I see, how much it has helped me, and how much the project needs the money. Maybe needless to say: Bug reports help a lot so I place them where I find one. Finally, when it comes to code contributions I find it hard. Usually that requires a lot of preparation and time to get into the depth of the project beyond the API/fronted. And that is, more often than not, a road block for me.

I think though, that the amount given is not a good measure on its own. It depends a lot on what one has and is able to give. There are so many people out there who earn way more than they need (including me, although I am nowhere rich). They could easily give a lot more and cover for a general user base. And the latter, making the project more popular and maybe contributing some bug reports is just as essential.

Adding an aspect: Removing bonds, like hydrogen bonds, takes energy. So if that energy was provided to release the bonds in the first place, the local reaction of atoms in the molecular gas into a multitude of molecules would release quite a bit of heat.