Hey Hurd Family, I'd like to launch a Hurd fundraiser with the goal to hire a developer for six months to a year. I'm going to put down the first $1,000 for this. Are there any developers interested in working on the Hurd full time for 6 months to a year?
How we get people to donate: I'll sell Hurd laptops. T43 - T200s, T400s, T500s, etc. Prices will range from $100 - $400. In the ideal scenerio, each laptop will dual boot the Hurd and perhaps Debian, so it will be a laptop that one can actually use. As we all know, the Hurd is not quite a daily driver yet. It would be great, if we could ship the new ext2 journal. It sounds like that is actually greatly making the Hurd's filesystem more reliable... We could even donate one to Richard Stallman, assuming he'd make a cool video endorsing our campaign. We could partner with guix-hosting.com to offer child-hurd VPSs. That's 100 euros per year. MAYBE, MAYBE, MAYBE, we could get the Hurd to run on a laptop that is sold by ThinkPenguin...and sell more modern laptops ? I've got access to some local used desktops. Dell Optiplexs. 7010s. Does anyone know if the Hurd would run on those? We could sell some T-shirts. There's a t-shirt company in town here that I could get on board. We could sell some usb sticks (which is hilarious, because the Hurd doesn't support USB)... We could sell CDs / DVDs. How else can we get people to donate? Whose the developer that we hire? What project should they try to complete? It would be nice if they spent some time cleaning up GNU Mach. It would be AWESOME if we had at least one language (other than C) that the average coder (that's me) could make Hurd translators. It would be great if "apt install *WEB BROWSER*" worked. There are several simple web browsers that work with minimal patches. Someone just needs to do a bit of work to make them installable via apt. Maybe this developer could retire netdde and switch the Hurd to using lwip. I think that would remove a lot of head aches for Samuel. Where do we host the campain ? The FSF could accept the donations. That's how guix is doing their current fundraiser. https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2025/fundraising-campaign-to-sustain-gnu-guix/ Do we do an indegogo campain? Kickstarter ? Thoughts? Suggestions? Your friend, Joshua Branson hurdos.com gnucode.org curiousfollowers.com
