In the second finding of the 2024 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer survey, we found that the more maintainers are paid, the more improvements they make to their projects.

...

In the previous finding, we reported that 60% of maintainers describe themselves as unpaid hobbyists, and 36% of maintainers describe themselves as paid (professional or semi-professional) maintainers, earning some or all of their income from their open source work.

...

When you break down the paid maintainers into professional (earning most or all of their income from their maintenance work) and semi-professional (earning some of their income from maintaining projects), it becomes clear that the amount of money a maintainer is making for their work has a large impact on the types of improvements they are able to make. Across nearly all major categories, professional maintainers are on average over 20 percentage points more likely to make key improvements to their projects than semi-professional maintainers.

...

In the previous study, 81% percent of professional maintainers earning most or all of their income from maintaining projects spend more than 20 hours a week maintaining their projects. This year, the percentage was nearly identical (82%).

Conversely, in last year’s survey, we found that the vast majority of unpaid hobbyists spend ten hours or less per week on their maintenance work (81%). This percentage also stayed consistent in this year’s survey, with 78% of unpaid hobbyist maintainers working ten hours or less per week.

...

We’ve heard from many maintainers that how they are paid for their work also matters. For many maintainers there is a huge difference between getting a one-time “airdrop” of money, perhaps right after a high profile incident where people are paying attention to their projects, compared to ongoing recurring income that they can count on. So this year for the first time we asked maintainers to tell us whether they would prefer to get predictable monthly income or a one-time lump payment.

An overwhelming majority of maintainers prefer to receive predictable monthly income, with 81% choosing that option.

I’m just looking for a simple 2D floor planner that is easy to use and has the ability to show measurements.

The two most recommended open source tools I’ve seen have shortcomings.

Sweet Home 3D:

• Very 3D centric, which over complicates things.
• Project was recently acquired/handed off to a company and the iOS version is published by “AI Photo Editor Lab SRL”

draw.io / diagrams.net:

• Very finicky to set up and create floor plans
• To display measurements one has to add measurement objects to every wall/object

Does anyone have other recommendations?

Hi

I'm looking for a FOSS app to design icons

I heard of GIMP , Kirta and Inkscape ,are there other alternatives ? and which one of them is the best for this ?

Thanks

Can't imagine using my system without this.

Element is launching the world’s first communications platform based on the upcoming Matrix 2.0 release. The result is blazing performance which outperforms the mainstream alternatives - across a decentralised system that enables self-hosting and end-to-end encryption - as well as open standard interoperability to revolutionise real time communication between large organisations.

Built on Matrix 2.0, Element X now rivals the performance of centralised consumer messaging apps, empowering organisations to address the shadow IT issues caused by consumer-grade messaging apps in the workplace.

The new Element communications solution consists:

• Element X, our next-gen app with an array of new features
• Element Call fully integrated into Element X, for native Matrix-encrypted voice and video
• Element Server Suite, our backend hosting solution for powerful admin control and Matrix 2.0 performance

Hi, was wondering if anyone knew of an app where you can use your camera to scan documents (like Adobe Scan) which is FOSS.

I'm looking for an alarm clock app alternative to the Google Clock, which I use mainly because it allows me to link a Spotify playlist to an alarm. Do you know about any app with similar characteristics? If not, then what is the best alarm clock app you would recommend?

Detailed post about FSFE's goals and main topics in 2024.

Table of contents:

• Device Neutrality: the Free Software community “shows its teeth”
• Next Generation Internet and the lack of long-term sustainable funding for Free Software
• Reaching Generation Alpha: Youth Hacking 4 Freedom and Ada & Zangemann
• Policy work: Advocating for Free Sotware
• Legal Support: giving advise to projects and individuals Our work on public awareness
• Join the movement

With a lot of open source projects being worked on largely out of passion rather than financial gain I feel like there must have been several times where a release caught people off guard and "came out of nowhere" with its impressive scale.

To give some examples of how this might happen maybe it was an initial release dropped to the public in a complete state that had been worked on for a while privately or a project that was dormant for an extended period of time and picked back up.

Can anyone here think of an example? It doesn't necessarily need to be something groundbreaking maybe it got people excited in a very specific niche.

If you do have an answer I'd appreciate it if you could elaborate on it.

Open source software is essential to the global economy, public services, and international organizations, yet many critical projects remain underfunded, highlighting the need for sustainable support.

The United Nations and other public institutions are increasingly recognizing the importance of open source, with initiatives like the Global Digital Compact and various national funds dedicated to supporting open source projects.

GitHub is actively involved in bridging the sustainability gap through initiatives like GitHub Sponsors, the FOSS Sustainability Fund, and resources for open source maintainers, emphasizing the need for collaborative investment from both public and private sectors.

After more than two years FlorisBoard (an open-source keyboard which respects your privacy) 0.4.0 is finally released with many new features including MDY support, addons store, incognito mode, major smartbar rework and many other bugfixes and improvements.

Regarding the spell checking (from GitHub release notes):

Word suggestions/spell checking are not included in the current releases and are a major goal for the v0.5 milestone.

PeerTube is a decentralized and federated alternative to YouTube. The goal of PeerTube is not to replace YouTube but to offer a viable alternative using the strength of ActivityPub and P2P protocols.

Being built on ActivityPub means PeerTube is able to be part of a bigger social network, the Fediverse (the Federated Universe). On the other hand, P2P technologies help PeerTube to solve the issue of money, inbound with all streaming platform : With PeerTube, you don't need to have a lot of bandwidth available on your server to host a PeerTube platform because all users (which didn't disable the feature) watching a video on PeerTube will be able to share this same video to other viewers.

If you are curious about PeerTube, I can't recommend you enough to check the official website to learn more about the project. If after that you want to try to use PeerTube as a content creator, you can try to find a platform available there to register or host yourself your own PeerTube platform on your own server.

The development of PeerTube is actually sponsored by Framasoft, a french non-for-profit popular educational organization, a group of friends convinced that an emancipating digital world is possible, convinced that it will arise through actual actions on real world and online with and for you!

Framasoft is also involved in the development of Mobilizon, a decentralized and federated alternative to Facebook Events and Meetup.

If you want to contribute to PeerTube, feel free to:

• report bugs and give your feedback on Github or on our forums
• submit your brillant ideas on our Feedback platform
• Help to translate the software, following the contributing guide
• Make a donation to help to pay bills inbound in the development of PeerTube.

Just wanted to highlight this project because I've had to take many personality tests for school and work and things, and this is the most accurate one I've seen, and the only one where I feel I'm actually learning about myself from the results.

So if you need a personality test for any reason this one's pretty good.

I had no idea this issue had been identified. While I find this tool very useful, the project is seeming rather questionable to me now.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/25312852

Flathub

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20306561

Hi everyone! For... I guess over a year now? I've been observing and trying out lots of software recommended by the privacy community and internet as a whole. With that time, I've been able to slowly put together a list of all the software I personally believe to be the best for their own various reasons. I finally have enough to be able to share it with all of you!

I'm also looking for feedback. I haven't tried all the software on that list, and I'm sure there's software I've never heard of that needs added. I'm looking for your feedback on what you think should be added, removed, or changed. That includes the list itself, if you think there are any design improvements.

Do note: Any software marked with a ⭐️ I am not looking for feedback on. This is software that I firmly believe is the best of the best in its category, and likely will not be changed. However, if there is a major issue with the software that you can provide direct proof of, then there is a chance it will be changed in the next release. There are no grantees.

The sections marked with ℹ️ are lacking, and can use your help! Some software there may not be the best one, or may have many software or sections missing. I am absolutely looking for help and feedback here, and would love your help!

My goal with this project is to help people find the best software from many standpoints, and to prove that there really are good open source alternatives for almost anything! I hope this helps someone, and I look forward to your feedback!

Thank you all for reading and taking the time to look through my list!

Edit: This project has moved to GitLab!

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/25183123

WebReady is a simple tool for converting videos to animated webp images and thus allowing users to use them as animated wallpapers for KDE. The tool is primarily designed for steam deck, but works perfectly on any KDE powered desktop.

I'm looking for suggestions for programs to help manage an archive of family photos and video clips. I have a large family and a few photographers can pump out a lot of photos at family events. I've sorta become the unofficial archivist of the family as I have a lot of photos and videos myself and I've become responsible for my parent's collection as well as they are not very tech savvy.

I'm kinda distrustful of cloud storage in general so I'm kinda looking to avoid using something like Google photos or even Proton Drive. I'd also like to try and stick to open source if I can. At this point I don't think my ideal program exists but I'm going to describe it and see how close we could get. Sorry if the following sounds too much like fantasy.

Ideally I'd like a program that could synchronize a media collection across the internet to 3 or 4 different households. For one thing so that there is redundancy if something bad like a fire happens so nothing is lost, and for another thing so that those households have local access to the archive. I'm hoping I wouldn't be needing any crazy hardware for this. Something like a raspberry pie with an attached spindle Drive would be acceptable, both for low power use and small physical footprint in the houses of family members I would be asking to host these.

Ideally some program could be used to interact with the archive locally and do things like add new media, edit metadata of media that's already in the archive or just view things.

That's it, Lemmy know what you guys think!

cross-posted from: https://biglemmowski.win/post/2418820

For me, the most interesting point was the short mention of open sourcing Factorio (around 2:40). Kovarex seems to be very much open to the idea, he mentions that (as an approximation) maybe two years after the DLC after things calm down ...

(Hope this is not much of a titlegore)

Fucks Given lets you keep track of the things that made you care. Whenever something happens that you needlessly concern yourself with, jot it down with a tap. The app creates a chart of how many fucks you’ve given, so you can work to give none.

The same opensource app, downloadable on both stores but paid on playstore and free on fdroid. Is it legal and is it ethical? Why?