One way to help free software projects

Free software projects are always looking for new volunteers to help, new coders, new translators, new documentation writers, ... However, sometimes you want to contribute but can't become any of those, either because you lack time, because you are already involved in other projects, or because you feel you don't have time. For some projects, another way to help is through donations, here are 2 examples for projects I'm involved with.

Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox has had a plugin for Magnatune for quite a while now. In addition to not being evil (their website says so, it must be true! Joke aside, they give 50% of what they sell to the artist), they give 10% back to the Rhythmbox project for every purchase through its plugin.

And since they are not evil, today they sent a $600 check to the GNOME Foundation (which we chose as the recipient for the money). So you can buy lots of cool music on Magnatune while giving money to the GNOME Foundation at the same time!

Thanks a lot to John Buckman from Magnatune who was a really nice guy to interact with and to Adam Zimmerman for all his hard work on Rhythmbox Magnatune plugin.

libgpod

libgpod is the iPod handling library used by gtkpod, rhythmbox, amarok, songbird, ... It recently gained support for most of the latest devices released by Apple (iPod Nano 5th generation, iPhone, iPod Touch) which were unsupported under Linux until now (thanks a lot to Marcan, Nikias and all the people who helped with that by the way :)

However, this development was made harder by the lack of devices to test the code on, forcing us to look for testers with the right devices and going back and forth with bug reports and bug fixes until things work as expected. So donations to the project (even small amounts) are really helpful so that we can buy these missing devices and move things forward.
This already let us fund an iPod Nano which was a tremendous help to polish support for it in libgpod, thanks to everyone that made that possible. Next on the list are an iPod Touch to make sure the iPhoneOS support is up to par, and a buttonless iPod Shuffle which is so far unsupported by libgpod.

I've already mentioned it here, but if you have old iPods you no longer use , please get in touch, they can also be helpful for testing (thanks Götz!)