We are happy to announce that we have joined Open Collective today! Open Collective is a platform where communities can collect and disburse money transparently to sustain and grow their projects.
In the past, we used Patreon and Liberapay, but we have chosen to go with Open Collective this time in an effort for transparency.
People have downloaded Nitrux over 500,000+ times in four years. If just 10% of those downloads contributed $1 each, the total funds would equal well over $50,000.
Now, let’s think about numbers for a moment.
We want to fund one full-time programmer on a project thoroughly. And we want a good one — someone with many years of experience that they can bring to the project, so we’ll need roughly $36,000 per year to afford that programmer’s full attention. To fully fund a full-time developer focused on that single project, using the number of downloads, we would need roughly 7% of them to contribute $1.
And here’s the crazy thing — those folks will have donated only $1 for a download. And, for that, they’ll get a whole and stable operating system, office suite, graphics suite, and everything else they could ever need. They would’ve supported the development of everybody else.
Pretty good deal, eh?
In other words: It’s doable. Even without any other means of support, this is a possible funding open-source development mechanism.
Of course, the above is an example, and our goals are much more down-to-earth.
Our immediate need is to cover the costs of our infrastructure, which, as visible on our page, is approximately $ 350 per month.
Nitrux is not a distribution that includes any commercial software, nor does it receive income from referral links, nor do we add advertisements to our website or adware to our distribution, so to us, websites like Open Collective are essential to continue to operate.
By using Open Collective, we can raise funds to cover many basic needs, like paying for the services we use to build and host our packages and ISO files. The dynamic in Open Collective allows contributors to assess the finances of the collective they’re supporting quickly.
That means anyone contributing with money can view the invoices attached to an expense, so everything is transparent. If you were to head over to our page at Open Collective, you would see the exact amount of the invoices we have already added as an expense.
Additionally, we will be doing live streams for when we make new releases, as we believe it’s an excellent way to interact with existing and new users.
We chose Open Collective precisely because it allows for greater transparency of these expenses. In this way, we hope to avoid misunderstandings (such as the myth that we used to sell the distribution, which was unavailable before 2020, as perpetuated by a popular website).
We build Nitrux because we love it, and there is no pressure to sponsor; however, we welcome anything you can spare. By sponsoring Nitrux, you give the development team a regular and predictable income to cover our hosting, development, and hardware testing costs. Contributed funds are used to finance the project’s needs, including, but not limited to, hosting/server costs, equipment, and funding the work of the people behind it.
You can contribute any amount you want. The team behind Nitrux will appreciate all contributions as they will help bring this wonderful project to the same level of quality as that of the much larger, top-tier projects.
With that said, to sponsor Nitrux click the button below.