The Icculus Microgrant 2020

(Other years of Microgrant history can be found here.)

Thank you to everyone that applied for and contributed to a second year of this bonkers idea. I hope we are all making the world a tiny bit better here!

What is this?

Google gave me 250 dollars and I gave it away:

Google gave me an award for my contributions to Linux gaming and open source, and while I’m honored to be acknowledged, I can’t accept money from a company that is actively engaging in union busting.

— Ryan C. Gordon (@icculus) December 25, 2019

Other people matched my 250 dollars, so there was more money given to more open source projects!

Since everyone liked this idea, I did it again the next year. Here we are!

The Contributors

Besides me, 24 other people contributed money to this effort. They kindly gave money and left choosing the projects entirely to me. Several asked to remain anonymous, but where I am able to give credit I like to, so thanks to the following people who gave money: begui, Adam, Chris McCann, Josef Vanzura, Dominik Reichardt, Asim Shrestha, Michael Sartain, @wickedlogic, Chris Bush, Michael Greenberg, Christopher Anderson, Joel Baxter, Kenny Goff, @mdiluz, Alex Colomb, @yoken55, and several others.

The Projects

Here are the projects I chose. Last year, the money was doled out in 250 dollar chunks, and I kept that policy this time, too. This year there was just short of 5,500 dollars available, so I rounded up to give $250 to 22 different projects.

We had over 100 project submissions, and many of them were great, and it was hard to narrow down to a list of both quality and variety. If you didn't get a microgrant, please don't take that to mean you weren't worthy; there were so many deserving projects and we only had so much money, so a lot of projects we just couldn't fund.

These projects are listed in no particular order. They are all amazing, and it would be impossible to say one is better than another.

• Pi-KVM, which turns a Raspberry Pi into a cheap-but-powerful network KVM switch.
• Firefly III, an open source personal finance manager, that helps you to be in control of both your money and your software at the same time.
• Moonwards, a multiplayer, virtual moon colony simulator.
• Sprytile, a tool that enables you to build 3D models in Blender out of tilemaps, for easy construction and a cool aesthetic.
• iGenomics, an iOS app for analyzing DNA. That's right: an open-source DNA analyzer in your pocket!
• Touchégg, a much-needed effort to vastly improve multitouch trackpad support on Linux.
• Mint, a programming language for the web, designed to make it easy and fun to build single-page apps.
• Pygame, who has been converting Python programmers into game developers for over 20 years now.
• floccus, a tool that synchronizes your bookmarks between web browsers, via a server you own, to escape the silos each browser developer has built for their own product.
• nCine2D, a mature, cross-platform, and Lua-scriptable 2D game framework.
• ImHex, a super-charged hex editor for reverse engineers (and also for "people that value their eyesight when working at 3AM"!).
• Shaken Fist, a minimalist cloud, intended to combat complexity and resource waste.
• Pixelorama, a powerful 2D sprite editor, built with the Godot Engine, that runs on several platforms...including in a web browser!
• Node SerialPort, a framework that enables you talk to hardware serial ports via Javascript, to power a million interesting projects.
• NovelRT, a 2D game engine with a strong focus on building visual novels.
• FreeCAD, an open source parametric 3D modeler, for all your computer-aided design needs.
• Haiku, an open reimplementation of BeOS that has grown into a mature operating system of its own over the years.
• Matplot++, a Data Visualization library for modern C++ developers.
• Pingnoo, a gorgeous cross-platform GUI for analyzing network traffic through traceroute and ping.
• Cadmium, the only Linux distro for the ARM64 mediatek chromebook.
• TabMerger, a cross-browser extension to merge all your tabs into a single, managable user interface...and reduce memory usage at the same time!
• ABStock, a free catalogue to show and sell books online, and OpenBookStore, to help bookshops manage their stock.

Apply or contribute next year!

There is an RSS feed that announces new rounds of funding, so currently it averages two new posts a year. That is available here. If you would like to donate money to the grants, or apply for a grant yourself, please watch this feed for details.

Questions? Concerns?

DM me on Twitter, or email me, if you prefer.

Thanks everyone, and let's do this again next year!
--ryan.