100,000 thanks

100,000 donations in 500 days, from May 1st, 2013, to October 13, 2014, with an average of 200 donations per day.

Three square numbers which have a greater meaning than their actual one, for the entire free software ecosystem.

Together with volunteers, contributing their time, and Advisory Board members, investing in The Document Foundation, individual donors are making the dream of an independent self-sustaining free software foundation – capable of pushing the best free office suite to the next level of awesomeness – a solid, enduring reality.

Back in 2010, when the independent foundation was announced, one of the most frequent objections was based on the false assumption that a large free software project cannot exist without a single large corporate sponsor.

After four years, we can not only affirm that the dream has come true, but that the dream has a bright future.

Thanks to donations, we have been able to fund hackfests (like the upcoming one in Toulouse, France, on November 15/16), QA volunteer netbooks for bug triage, tinderboxes for developers, improvements of ask.libreoffice.org for non-english users, LibreOffice booths at exhibitions, native language community events, a stronger independent infrastructure, and so on.

What is more important, we have been able to demonstrate that a large free software project does not need a single large corporate sponsor to thrive, but can rely on a diverse ecosystem based on companies but also on volunteers, supported by individual donors.

Companies come and go, while volunteers – and hopefully individual donors – stay.

So far, they have had the unique power of making a ten year long dream come true, and become history. With a simple donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org, they can keep the history alive, forever.

100,000 thanks, again.