Hello all! We’re pleased to announce this experiment, a fund raiser leading up to the launch of Solus Operating System v1, October 1st. We’d like to see if we can raise $1,000 (US) in the next couple of weeks.
The Whats
There’s some bits and pieces we need to get together before the release comes out, including (but not limited to):
- Printer/Scanner combo (for enabling)
- AMD/ATi GPU (enabling)
- Bluetooth audio hardware (likely a headset, again for audio/bt stack enabling)
Those bits aside, we’ve all been growing a bit nervous lately at the bandwidth situation. Our packages have to exist in a primary source (packages.solus-project.com), which is kept secure and maintained by one release manager, and then propagated to other mirrors. In the last few months we’re seeing a lot more traffic come by, and users are beginning to suffer, waiting on increasing update times. Not to mention we’re now going through several terabytes of bandwidth a month now as a project, and this is constantly growing.
In short, logic dictates that if we’re getting this much increasing attention lately, and it will grow with the RC1 and final releases, we simply will not be able to deal with the demand. As such, we’re having to expand our infrastructure to accommodate this, and continue to support this for the first few months of the project lifetime. Currently the Patreon campaign only *just- about covers it, though I’m sure if I factored in the recent NAS addition, currency conversion, we’d be down here. And we need to grow to support the growing userbase. (Point of interest, main repository served 443.80 GB this month, and just one of our ISO mirrors used 1,361.50 GB this month. We’ve not even put the RCs out yet.)
As the costs rise, and we need to support them for the first few months at least, we’re reaching out to you, our userbase, to help us get through the first few months with the hosting, hardware, until books begin to balance and we start becoming more self sufficient.
The Whys
We’ve experimented with various forms of project support, the most prominent of those being our Patreon campaign. However, it fluctuates constantly, and it’s at an all time low of $78 (from $500, which changed in the month of commitment).
We’ve been racking our brains thinking about the best way to approach this, and the thoughts that came around a few times were:
- Put the ISOs behind a paywall (“pay what you want”)
- Stick ads .. everywhere?
- Kickstarter
Regarding the paywall option, this is something we really don’t feel like agreeing with or implementing, so it will **never be used by our project. **Ads, as everyone knows, are immensely annoying, screw up website layouts, usually introduce .. questionable.. content, that cannot be controlled, and actually bring in a really poor amount of money for such an enormous sacrifice of webspace. Kickstarter, we feel, is for much bigger campaigns over a bigger timespread.
How To Support
We’re going to track the progress publicly on the new fundraiser page. When donating via PayPal, please let us know if you do *not want your- name listed on the fundraiser page. We ask that you use the PayPal option, as Patreon is a monthly pledge that could in theory cause this fundraiser effort to fail.
Lastly
Thank you pre-emptively for all those who might support us! The next few weeks are going to be truly exciting, as we roll out Solus to the world, and unleash our last secrets and vision upon everyone. We’ll ensure to keep this all 100% transparent, and if we manage to actually exceed our target, it opens up a lot of interesting opportunities! (Such as getting that stronger SSL certificate, a secure boot key, all the things we’d really want but find very hard to financially justify right now)