Canvassing for the commons (froscon2026)

Come along for a journey through the trenches of trying to find funding for projects related to a community-run Linux distribution. Community-driven projects are notoriously understaffed and underfunded. Even a fairly popular Linux distribution such as Arch Linux struggles to keep up with bug fixes and features for its own projects. Under these circumstances long-running maintenance work or developing novel approaches to long standing problems mostly results in nothing more than wishful thinking. With the rise of dedicated software funds, the free software ecosystem at large has a few avenues at its disposal. In this talk I will provide background information and first hand experience with various publicly accessible funds, as well as corporate funding for projects related to Arch Linux. Together, we will dive into concrete numbers, best practices, pitfalls and what it means to be a freelance software developer in this ecosystem, that is competing over the funding from various sources. Licensed to the public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 about this event: https://programm.froscon.org/2026/events/3598.html