apt-give

1

Install dependencies.

apt install curl jq

2

Download and install.

sudo curl https://apt.gives/apt-give \
     -o /usr/local/bin/apt-give && \
     sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/apt-give

You are invited to review the contents of the script before execute it: it is a quite simple Bash script.

3

Execute.

apt-give

4

Give.

The command processes the list of packages currently installed on the system, and displays an aggregated list of websites on which it is possible to donate.

It's up to you to decide how much, and to whom: you can give the same amount to each project, or divide your budget proportionally based on the number of packages installed, you can donate only to the largest projects or vice versa only to the lesser-known ones (and probably with fewer resources) that you didn't even know you had installed.

The important thing is that you give.

Why?

Chances are that you already read something about open source sustainability, lack of financial support, maintainers burn outs, massive security threats triggered by lack of resources and similar stuffs.

The core issue is about evil "big tech" making billions of dollars on top of open source software without giving back a cent, blamed for their greed by people crying for government intervention or fiscal regulation. The same people daily working and paying rent, bills and groceries with open sorce software without giving back a cent.

apt-give is a tool aimed to fix the second part of that core issue. Providing an easy way to contribute financially to the open source projects on which your work, your servers, your activities and - in many cases - your sources of income depend more or less directly.

How?

The biggest part of the apt-give initiative is the curated index of donation pages for each package listed in the main apt repository of Debian Stable (which is used as a reference).

To contribute, providing some new link or fixing the existing ones, visit the GitLab repository of this project.

Then?

Actually, apt-give should not exist.

Some specialized package managers (as npm and composer) provide built-in features to highlight donations options. Developers can easily embed their PayPal/GitHub/OpenCollective links into the package informations, and users can easily list those links for packages they are actually using within their own projects.

The same feature has been specified in AppStream metadata file format, intended to be adopted by maintainers and packagers to share basic informations about software, but very few developers deliver those metadata files and no apt fund (nor dnf fund or pacman fund) is implemented.

Please bother the authors of your preferred software and the maintainers of your preferred Linux distributions to implement the AppStream specification, as the main target of apt-give is to become useless and superseeded by implementation in the core of classic package managers.

Who?

The apt-give project is maintained by Bob, a freelance software developer with a passion for free and open source software.

Every year, he distributes 1% of his (modest) revenues to the open source projects he utilizes in his daily work to build and deliver solutions for his clients. And invites you to do the same.