The Icculus Microgrant 2021

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

Thank you to everyone that applied for and contributed to a third 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. And here we are at year three!

The Contributors

Besides me, 59 other people contributed money to this effort. They kindly gave money and left choosing the projects entirely to me. Unlike previous years, where I mostly talked to people over twitter to arrange donations, this year went a little viral, and I got many, many donations from people I can't identify or contact, so I'm going to leave everyone's name blank here. Please know that I'm eternally grateful to you all, though!

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 7250 dollars, so I rounded up to give $250 to 29 different projects.

We had 192 unique 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.

• Essence, a from-scratch operating system.
• Game Pencil Engine, a simple 2D game creator.
• SDL_ActionSet, an attempt to implement new input paradigms in SDL.
• Project Slippi, which built reply/metadata infrastructure for Super Smash Bros Melee.
• Svgbob, for converting ASCII diagram scribbles into happy little SVG.
• Platelet, a dispatch system designed for emergency volunteer couriers.
• Malt, providing a fully customizable real-time rendering framework for animation and illustration.
• TermGL, a terminal graphics library, capable of both 2D and 3D color ASCII graphics in the terminal.
• PixiEditor, a beautiful, lightweight pixel-art editor packed in eye-friendly dark theme.
• BlueRetro, offering a multiplayer Bluetooth controllers adapter for various retro game consoles.
• Kavita, a self-hosted manga, comic, and ebook manager and reader which connects to 3rd party apps.
• CatClient, for simple filehosting with access management.
• rose.parser, which can generate serialization code for simple C headers.
• Typewrite Something, a web-based typewriter simulator that has uses in education.
• tubesync, a PVR/sonarr/style download manager for YouTube.
• r/TranscribersOfReddit infrastructure, the code that lets an army of volunteers transcribe content on Reddit.
• Libation, which can scan your Audible audiobook library, download it and remove DRM.
• StageShow, an AI-powered webcam filter for Linux, to shift a camera viewframe to always center on your face.
• Silk.NET, offering high-speed .NET multimedia, graphics, and compute.
• ArkScript, a small, embeddable LISP-like scripting language.
• Cloverleaf, a stateless password manager. A password manager with no saved data at all!
• minicoro, a single-file library for using asymmetric coroutines in C.
• Latte Dock, a desktop Dock, meant to replace KDE Plasma's default dock.
• Remmina, every Linux user's favorite remote desktop client.
• Kira, a backend-agnostic library to create expressive audio for games.
• jira-cli, a feature-rich command line tool for working with JIRA.
• verco, a simple Git/Mercurial/PlasticSCM tui client based on keyboard shortcuts.
• GodotSteam, a Godot Game Engine module to add Steamworks support.
• typescript-calendar-date, a zero-dependency, small, immutable library for handling calendar dates correctly.

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.