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Buttondown's funding of open source software

Without open source software, there would be no Buttondown. That's why we're committed to sharing our profits with the open source community.

Buttondown's funding of open source software
Note
CloseThis blog post is from 2020. Contents (and screenshots) may be a bit of out date, but we've kept it up out of posterity.

Software sits on the shoulders of giants.

Buttondown is a tool that simply would not exist without the gargantuan effort of many, many open-source projects, the vast majority of which are drastically underfunded relative to the value they provide.

I've committed to donating at least 10% of Buttondown's profits to the software that enables it. This is a relatively low number in absolute terms — I'm certainly not changing anyone's life — but I think it's still important.

I've finally pulled together a document for tracking Buttondown's public donations, and you can follow it here.

(I haven't pulled it server-side, like I did with my running costs, because I anticipate the data being much more boring. But if that changes in the future, I'll certainly re-evaluate!)

Correction

An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that we donated 20% of profits to open source. This figure has been corrected to "at least 10%".

Published on

March 9, 2020

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Written by

Justin Duke

Justin Duke is a software engineer, lover of words, and the creator of Buttondown.

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