Dear Friends,
We’d like to formally introduce the IPFire Wishlist – The new IPFire crowd funding platform. The wishlist is the IPFire crowd funding platform where you can donate to help accelerate the development of your favorite features.
What is this and why do we need it?
The IPFire project is an Open Source project. We don’t have any companies that support us monetarily. We are only a team of people who work voluntarily on the project. The project has grown and has a significant infrastructure that is needed to run and maintain daily operations. We also do developer summits to exchange new ideas and bring the developers together, which is also expensive.
Unfortunately, the IPFire developers themselves are currently the only ones putting money into the project. Donations, which have never been enough to pay for the needed things, have declined in the last year. These funds are essential and are used for various things such as paying our hosting provider and upgrading hardware that is needed to build ports to other architectures (such as ARM).
As IPFire has features commonly sought-after in large enterprises, we’d speculate that more than a half of all IPFire installations are running in companies across the globe. These companies would typically have to pay a huge amount of money for a commercial solution that has the same power and flexibility as IPFire. We bring you IPFire for free and that’s okay with us!
How can I help?
Helping out is easy! Just head over to the wishlist and choose the wish you would like to see implemented in the future. Hit the donate button and donate the amount of money this feature is worth to you. After that, tell all of your friends and collegues about it and encourage them to promote your favorite wish as well. That’s it!