Unixstickers' Most Important Decision Since the Popular E-Commerce Got Started

Bologna, Italy, February 27, 2016 (Newswire.com) - Unixstickers is the largest e-commerce focused on distributing stickers, t-shirts and swag on unix, software, open source and programming with more than 20,000 customers from 100 countries and licensing agreements with the most important trademark holders in the area, such as Red Hat’s Fedora, openSUSE, Ruby on Rails, Tor, Scala​ ​and more.

The physical products available on Unixstickers refers to some of the leading technologies behind the software we use everyday, including websites and apps. These technologies are used by hundreds of millions of developers, but are only sustained by volunteers and donors, potentially undermining their long term sustenance.

Today, Unixstickers is launching a new way to contribute to linux, open source and free software and at the same time is making a big stand toward their sustainability: a significant part of its sales will now be donated to sustain the projects each customer is purchasing stickers and merchandise of, in addition to funding a monthly initiative close to the world of open source and free software.

As a first test, in the first month, Unixstickers will be donating up to the 10% of its revenues, summing up to​ thousands of dollars per month​ that will help funding the future of software.

What’s even better: Unixstickers is leading one of the first initiatives of this kind by making its donation system totally transparent. At any time, users will be able to visit a l​ ive report of how much has been donated​ in a given month and to which projects. When customers are completing their purchase, moreover, they will be able to see in real time how much Unixstickers will donate to their favorite projects!

This live report is available at w​ ww.unixstickers.com/donations
Unixstickers has also published an open letter (available at www.unixstickers.com/blog/unixstickers-new-donation-system-open-letter)​ claiming this is the most important decision the company has made since its foundation.

The program will work in three directions:

1. First of all, Unixstickers will raise money “directly” for some of the biggest projects in their catalogue (such as Debian, Arch Linux, GNU, Fedora etc). This means that the money raised from the sales of Arch Linux will be donated to Arch Linux and so on.

2. Moreover, each month Unixstickers will choose a charity or organization from the free software and open source movement, to which part of the sales will also be donated

3. Finally, Unixstickers will be offering free merchandise to any relevant FOSS initiative in need.

In total, Unixstickers estimate to donate thousands of dollars per month to the Free software and Open Source community starting from March, and this is only the beginning.

Here are some data that that show how the donation flow for FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) projects has increased dramatically in the last few years.
In 2015 alone, the Free Software Foundation reached $1,188,318 of total revenue the 83.3% of their total expenses for the three main Foundation’s programs (License Education Program, GNU Project and Education and Outreach Program).

The donations’ importance emerges also by reading the “Software in the Public Interest Inc.” annual report: in 2015 SPI Inc. backed 26 projects, reaching a gross income of $377,546.48. The projects funded range from an open source warfare game (0 A.D.) to well known projects such as Debian, Arch Linux, PostgreSQL and LibreOffice.

Last but not least, in 2015 the search engine DuckDuckGo raised $125,000 to redistribute across five projects (SecureDrop, PrivacyBadger, GPG Suite, Tails and Girl Develop It).

These sums are significant, but not impressive. All companies working with or on open source and free software should make a move like Unixstickers’. This also gives a measure of how much even the few thousand dollars that a single company like Unixstickers will donate each month can make a huge impact.

“Besides Open Source companies that are currently making money, there are plenty of small and non-commercial projects that need our support and the support of the whole community in order to keep going. We wanted to find a way to do that in the most transparent and effective way possible”​ said Stefano Di Luca, Director of Unixstickers.

The first organization to benefit from Unixstickers’ donations will be​ ​t​h​e​ F​ ree Software Foundation​ that is home to some of the most important initiatives when it comes to promoting the Free Software and its development.