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.

The Flattr FOSS project is quite young so very few free software are currently listed in the dedicated directories. It’s still advocacy time: if there are free software that you’d like to flattr, please tell them and point them to Flattr FOSS.

It’s too early for any conclusion, but the feedback from users is good and it looks like that people using flattr to support free software are more generous than the average flattr user. You’re great people! 🙂

Anyway, it’s time for me to give a few suggestions of projects to flattr.

1. My first recommendation is Project Hamster, it’s a time-tracking application for GNOME but it has come a long way thanks to the work of Toms Bauģis. I use everyday and it rocks.
2. My second recommendation is Överallt, it’s a Firefox extension that allows usage of Flattr even in places where it was not designed to be used: forums, mailing list archives, etc. The persons using Flattr just put [Flattr=20693] in their signature and the Firefox extension automatically replaces this text with a real Flattr button ready to be clicked. Thanks to Paul Da Silva for the nice idea and the first implementation!
3. My third recommendation is Mustard, it’s a StatusNet client for the Android platform. More concretely you can install it on your Android phone to send updates to identi.ca while traveling. I have no Android phone but Mustard seems to be popular among owners of such phones!
4. My fourth recommendation is moreutils from Joey Hess. It’s set of unix (command line) tools that “nobody else thought of writing when unix was young” (according to Joey himself). They are all very useful, I use more or less regularly isutf8 (verify if a file is UTF-8 compliant), combine (logical operations on lines of two files), pee (send standard input to two programs, very useful in git hooks when you want to run two programs that both consume the same data), sponge (ever tried “grep -v foo file >file” and lost your data? now you can use “grep -v foo file | sponge file”). And Joey is a long time Debian developer who has truly shaped Debian, he’s behind several major Debian projects (debconf, debian-installer, debhelper, …). Big kudos to him!
5. My last recommendation is to flattr Andreas Gohr for his work as dokuwiki lead developer. There’s no flattr button on dokuwiki’s website but you’ll find some in Andreas’ blog, just pick a dokuwiki related article like this one: Dokuwiki Birthday Bughunting Weekend. Dokuwiki is a simple wiki that works without any database (the pages are stored in flat files) and it’s even commonly used to setup simple websites thanks to the numerous themes available.

Okay, that’s it for this month. I’ll try to keep a broad panel of software (desktop, command line, mobile, web, etc.). Since I have promoted a GNOME desktop application, I would like to be able to promote a KDE or XFCE application next month but I did not discover any KDE/XFCE project using Flattr… do you know any? Please share in the comments if you find some.

Also I wonder if you have decided of a flattr strategy… Personally I’m likely to flattr my favorites projects/persons each month and to flattr a few other occasionally as I discover them. What’s your own strategy?