The Icculus Microgrant 2019

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

Thank you to everyone that applied for and contributed to 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!

The Contributors

Besides me, 14 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: Chris Bush, General Arcade, @ghostynewt, Izzy Muerte, Matthew Garrett, Christopher Anderson, @nwnk, Rob Drury, Andrew Sampson, Alex Malinovich, and several others.

The Projects

Here are the projects I chose. Since there were so many good ones, I decided to split the available money into 250 dollar chunks and hit as many as possible instead of hitting one with thousands of dollars. Originally, there were around 100 projects to sort through. We have 3,550 dollars pledged, so 14 projects, with 50 dollars left over, which I'll toss to one last project that is notable.

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

• openbenches.org, which tracks memorials on benches. It's just so unusual and interesting, and appealed to the archivist in me. *tweet*
• @OptOutSocial is building tools to deal with sexual harrassment online: *tweet*
• SWI-Prolog maintains an open source implementation of Prolog: *tweet*
• Caleb is working on a Metal backend for FNA, to make XNA-based games work better on a Mac (his tweet mentions my project MojoShader, but I wrote the Metal pieces for that a long time ago; his work is separate) : *tweet*
• Bjorn is working on a unique and audacious graphics layer sort of thing. It's hard to explain, but he's currently 3,300+ commits in and going strong: *tweet*
• Ofer is working on making graphs and complex data accessible to the blind: *tweet*
• HamBSD is bringing amateur packet radio to OpenBSD: *tweet*
• @random_foo has a small, full-featured Markdown library in C: *tweet*
• Lupo has the most amazing screenshot utility I've ever seen: *tweet*
• Duncan maintains x64dbg, a powerful debugger: *tweet*
• Tariq is working on better ways to introduce kids to programming: *tweet*
• Alexander has a pretty nice visualization library in Javascript: *tweet*
• The Capstone Engine is a disassembler framework (among other related, impressive projects from this crew) : *tweet*
• James has a automation project that has made some serious progress: *tweet*

The 50 dollar project:

• PomatiaTheSnail is a small robotic snail. They need to ship an entire lab from from the US to the Netherlands to continue the project. 50 dollars won't cover it, but if anyone wants to donate to help, you can do so here. *tweet*

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.