A new month means new free software projects to support with Flattr FOSS. I’m happy to see that it’s gaining traction outside of the Debian world as well. I saw quite a few new entries for free software projects so that I don’t have to fear running out of suggestions in the next few months. 🙂
Let’s go over the 5 projects that I recommend you for December:

1. Getting Things GNOME (flattr link) is a GNOME task manager. Its name is a play on David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) but the software doesn’t enforce the GTD methodology. You can implement GTD however since the software is very flexible and lets you organize the tasks with arbitrary tags. It’s a promising software and it can be extended with many plugins.
2. The W3C validator (flattr link) is used by thousands of web developers to verify that their HTML pages are well formed. But did you know that it was free software? Yes you can contribute code, or you can help them with a flattr.
3. Bitlbee (flattr link) is a gateway between IRC and many other instant messaging protocols. Geeks are known to be IRC addicted (at least I am using it for Debian development) and with bitlbee it’s one reason less to watch something else than the IRC client. 🙂
4. Arch Hurd (flattr link) is a port of the ArchLinux distribution to the GNU Hurd kernel.
5. Paste.debian.net (flattr link) is a simple website where you can share some textual content for a limited amount of time (you usually paste the content from some other applications, hence its name). Very handy when you want to quickly show something to others on IRC. This service is run by Debian developer Alexander Wirt.

That’s it for this month. A quick question to finish this issue: I count at least 15 Debian contributors using Flattr currently, would you be interested by a small directory listing them?

A new month has just begun, it’s again time for a few suggestions of free software projects to flattr. This is Flattr FOSS in action.

Enough said, let’s start with my suggestions:

1. The battle for Wesnoth is a great turn-based tactical strategy game (I spent countless hours on it a few years ago). It’s been a long time I have not played on my computer, but opensource games should be encouraged. Lack of good games is one of the few recurring complaints that come back from people trying out Linux for the first time. And The battle for Wesnoth is a very active project, so there’s no reason to not support them.
2. Shutter is the next-generation tool to take screenshots, it’s quite popular at least in Ubuntu and it can easily replace the default gnome-screenshot application. You can apply various effects on the fly, and upload the resulting pictures directly on image hosting sites (Flickr, Picasa, etc.).
3. Awesome is a highly configurable window-manager for X. I use it as a tiling window manager (windows are arranged to always fill the entire screen). Its configuration file consists of LUA code so it’s for power-users mainly… Julien Danjou started Awesome but he has also written many other small nifty tools, discover them in his Flattr profile.
4. Sparkleshare is a new collaboration tool that will transparently synchronize a folder between several computers/persons and inform you in real-time of changes. Under the hood, it uses public Git hosting sites (like Github or Gitorious) to store and exchange the data. In some aspects, it’s like Dropbox’s shared folders. You can also read Linux Weekly News’ review of it.
5. My last suggestion is to support Harald Welte and his projects. Click here to see his Flattr profile. He is someone in the free software world. First of all he’s a famous kernel hacker, he wrote much of the firewalling code (known as netfilter). He also initiated gpl-violations.org and ensured that the GNU General Public License was respected when he found out companies that failed to meet the terms of the license. Lately he has been reverse-engineering the whole GSM stack — pointing out security problems as he discovers them — with the goal to provide a free implementation of everything (first results are in projects OsmocomBB and OpenBSC). Isn’t that impressive?

That’s it for this month. By the way, did you tell your friends how easy it is to support free software with Flattr? Share this article with them and let them join Flattr FOSS too.

Since I published “How to make 110.28 EUR in one month with free software and Flattr”, quite a few people joined the movement and I had less troubles finding projects to Flattr. That’s great! 🙂

Without further ado, here are my recommendations for september:

1. Smuxi is an IRC application that integrates from the start the need to be permanently connected. You can run the “engine” on a server and the graphical interface connects there. The engine has all the intelligence so it remembers what message you last saw in each channel (including highlights) and you won’t miss anything. I recently switched to it and I like it. It’s not perfect but it’s improving quickly. The next version even supports Ubuntu’s messaging indicator for better integration with the desktop.
2. Geshi is a PHP class used by many other software to provide enhanced views of code on web pages by coloring the various parts based on the syntax of the respective programming language. It’s used by Wikipedia, many blog plugins and lots of other web applications.
3. Git-buildpackage is a set of tools developed by Guido Günther to make it easier to maintain Debian packages in Git repositories. I use it for several packages that I maintain.
4. Mixare is an augmented reality browser. Take your Android phone and it will incrust information in the (camera) view of the environment. Impressive video on the website.
5. Lightspark is is a modern flash player implementation targetting ActionScript 3.0 support (while Gnash only supports older versions). It’s one of those few projects that are really needed to get rid of the non-free Adobe plugin that almost everybody installs because there’s nothing else that work well enough.

This article is part of the Flattr FOSS project.