For those that haven't been following my work I have recently ran two crowd funding campaigns to enable me to work full time as an independent developer improving the Linux OpenGL drivers.
My second campaign was funded in just 24 hours and I'm incredibly grateful to all the people that donated their hard earned cash to support me. However this has got me thinking, although I have already gotten many offers to support any future endeavours I don't know how sustainable it is ask for money every time I want to do some Mesa work.
So I've come up with a couple of ways you can help support my development work without costing you a cent.
1. Join my Litecoin Mining team
Use my referral url below to sign up for a new pool account at LTCRabbit.com and the fee's that normally go to the website will now go towards my open source development work.
https://www.ltcrabbit.com/#af6irw
Note: If you don't mine bitcoins already my comment about not costing you a cent could be wrong as it will cost you some electricity.
2. Shop at Amazon
If you have some Christmas shopping to do these holidays or any other time. Just click the link below to go to Amazon for your shopping and you will be helping support me. Its as easy as that.
Support Mesa Development - Shop At Amazon US
Support Mesa Development - Shop At Amazon CA
3. Flattr
This kind of defeats the purpose of the post in that I'm now receiving donations directly. But seems to be a popular request so I've created a flattr account and added buttons to this site. Also as pointed out by Kamil you can even subscribe (rather than a once off donation) using the flattr button shown here or at https://flattr.com/thing/2313212/Independent-Mesa-Developer-Alternative-Funding-Model . After that, every month a fraction of your monthly budget will go towards funding my development work.
So how does this help improve Mesa?
Well the following items are what I would like to purchase to help with my work.
Its often helpful when doing Mesa development work and writing piglit tests to be able to test how OpenGL functionality works on the closed source AMD/Nvidia drivers. For this reasons I would like to purchase a Nvidia card for my desktop machine that supports OpenGL 4.4
Currently I do a lot of my development work while travelling to work on the train using my laptop. My laptop has Intel graphics which is great but for the reasons mentioned above it would be really great to be able to get a laptop with a Nvidia gpu also.
Unfortunately mining can be unpractical because of electricity costs, however I would be happy to support using Amazon. I have a question though, does it work even if buy from a localized amazon such as amazon.ca or amazon.it?
//fed
Hi thanks for the feedback. Yes its up to everyone to decide if mining is a fit for them. I've just looked into the Amazon local issue and it seems I need to join the associates program for each local for it to work. As there are quite a few I will consider joining those locals that people request here and add a new link. Which local is it that you use?
Amazon.ca please, I've used amazon.it too but probably I'm not going to use it much in the future so that's not important if applying is complicated.
Done thanks for the feedback 🙂
Have you tried https://registration.nvidia.com/ahr.aspx or contacting Nvidia directly? They may have some hardware donation program that applies to your work.
As per the localised Amazon, UK's would be interesting.
No I haven't asked Nvidia for some hardware as I assumed I would be wasting my time. Nvidia doesn't seem to care about the open source drivers. I guess I could give it a go ... but I wont be holding my breath.
I have also added an Amazon UK link 🙂
Update: Looks like my Amazon UK application was denied so I've removed the link.
What about a flattr account?
Ok I've created a flattr account and added it to my website. I think I need to clean things up a bit though as its hard to see the button. Thanks for the suggestion.
Don't forget to mention in this article that people might even subscribe (not just one-time donate) using the flattr button shown here or at https://flattr.com/thing/2313212/Independent-Mesa-Developer-Alternative-Funding-Model . After that, every month a fraction of their monthly budget will go to you. Thanks for creating Flattr.
Thanks for pointing this out. I wasnt aware of this 🙂
I don't think this is a very good setup for flattr.
Its connected to the blog posts rather than the mesa development itself.
So it will not be listed correctly on the site, the description and title isn't correct (well, I assume people don't mean to be flattring this awesome blog post one per month, but rather your continuous mesa development).
Had i not been the one to come here and suggest flattr, I wouldn't have ever discovered this and never donated anything. Even if I had accidentally found it, with just a few flattrs I would have most likely skipped it (I'm a bit skeptical about just 1-2 flattrs), and with blog posts, even if more people flattr you, its for a different blog post, so it'll never really go up high.
Could you please create a software project on flattr, with a bit more of a description (like links to the indiegogo campaigns), a more appropriate titel, e.g. "Independent Mesa developer - Your name" that would be listed under software and open source? like gimp
https://flattr.com/thing/707850/GIMP-is-the-GNU-Image-Manipulation-Program
(I'm not sure if it is possible to set something like that up, but Gimp managed to do it).
For lack of that option, I added a flattr subscription to the github account you had connected to your user instead. Perhaps you can advertise that one for mesa dontations instead?
(or perhaps, flattr just isn't a suitable way to do this).
Thanks for the feedback. I will look into your suggestions, unfortunately I had never used Flattr before your suggestion so I'm still very much in the learning stage of how it works. Thanks again.
Hello,
I try to launch my miner with your pool, but it didn't found it.
My command:
./bfgminer -S opencl:auto -o http://timothyja.triplemining.com:3334 -u XXXXX -p XXXX
Hi,
Did you get it to work? I can see a user in the pool that joined 3 hours ago.
It's not me, I'm currently mining within eu1.triplemining.com.
Does the command I posted is the right one?
Looks like I misunderstood how you create a minipool. You need to use my link http://timothyja.triplemining.com when you are signing up to triplemining to join my minipool and you cannot switch pools afterwards.
Up to you if you want to create a new account. I'll update my webpage with this information. This is disappointing I wonder how many others tried to join and just gave up 🙁
I really don't understand and it should work.
I follow your link, which in fact is redirected to https://www.triplemining.com/register, then I register (a second account hence), but it looks like it created my new own minipool. I added a worker and then try to mine with your address but it's the same, my miner doesn't find the URL.
Sorry, I mean "I really don’t understand HOW it should work".
Once you sign up with my address you are in my pool. You just need to use the normal address stratum.triplemining.com:3334 to start mining. Thanks for your effort in getting this working.
Ok, it works now.