Why I'm donating $150/month (10% of my income) to the musl Libc project (2019)
Published in 2021, this chronicle by @Tomte details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $150/month.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 447 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 158 comments
I guess no better post than this to remind everyone that the Zig Software Foundation is half-way through the current donation goal, which would allow us to hire two more full-time developers.
https://github.com/sponsors/ziglang
On a separate note, I'm learning a lot about how different software foundations operate and I'm very surprised to see that very few prioritize the goal of paying their core developers. I encourage everyone to check out the mission of the Zig Software Foundation and to compare it with how we're spending the money we're getting. Everything is available here:
https://ziglang.org/zsf/
From [1]:
Seems relevant given the recent hub-bub over Rust leadership/governance.
Another interesting model is LF and Linus Torvalds. (NS)BDFL who has the best interest of the project in mind, but doesn't seem improperly influenced by LF supporter companies.
[1] https://ziglang.org/news/jakub-konka-hired-full-time/
Somehow I loved this article and the response, even though it was admittedly a funding stunt. There was something very endearing about how straitforward and innocent the stunt was.
Two very deserving projects got funding (musl and Zig). I have used musl, mainly through Alpine Linux. I have not used Zig, but it seems it is a very interesting answer to the question of what does a systems programming language that is not C or C++ look like. We have one recent answer in the form of Rust, and Zig is another answer with another set of priorities and tradeoffs.
It is a very exciting time in terms of real-world language development.
All the best to the open source contributors of all these languages and libraries!
2021 update:
* The Zig Software Foundation now exists
* My total income including ZSF Salary, GitHub Sponsors, Patreon is now about 4000 USD per month. Legally, my ZSF salary is 160K per year, but I have been consistently donating it back to the org since frankly we just don't have that much revenue at this point in time, and I've been prioritizing getting that money to other Zig contributors.
* The $150/month to Rich Felker now comes from ZSF instead of my personal account.
* Zig 0.5.0, 0.6.0, 0.7.0, 0.8.0 have all been released. 0.9.0 is coming soon.
* I no longer really have an opinion about V; it's been two years since I paid any attention to it.
Consider joining Giving What We Can - an international community of people who have pledged to give at least 10% of their income to causes that they think are most effective at eliminating what they think are the world's biggest problems. (I'm a proud member for 10 years).
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/