The Solus team has launched a fundraiser for the OS

Aug 24, 2015 08:55 GMT  ·  By

The Solus operating systems is on track for an October 1 release, but its makers do need help from the community. A fundraiser has been put forth by the Solus team, and anyone can contribute.

Despite popular belief, open source usually costs money. It is free for the people who are downloading and using it, but the developers do have costs to worry about, at least for Internet and hardware. If you also happen to have a successful project, like Solus, a lot of people are going to download it, and they're not getting a small package. When you sum everything up together, you will find that it's not easy to pay for everything out of your pocket unless you're Mark Shuttleworth.

The Solus team wanted to try some options, like ads, a paywall, or even a Kickstarter project, but they don't really fit with what the developers want to do. So they started a fundraising campaign, and their aim is to raise about $1,000 in about two weeks. It's not a large sum of money, and it's pretty achievable, given the success of the project.

Solus will be free

One thing's sure, if the developers didn't even want to put a paywall, you can be sure that they intend to keep the operating system free. They do have some plans to make it profitable in the future with a hardware deal (maybe), but that's not happening anytime soon.

"Those bits aside, we’ve all been growing a bit nervous lately at the bandwidth situation. Our packages have to exist in a primary source (packages.solus-project.com), which is kept secure and maintained by one release manager, and then propagated to other mirrors. In the last few months, we see a lot more traffic come by, and users are beginning to suffer, waiting on increasing update times. Not to mention we’re now going through several terabytes of bandwidth a month now as a project, and this is constantly growing," wrote Ikey Doherty, the leader of the project.

You can check out the Solus fundraising website and see if you can donate to the project. In the meantime, Solus now also has a new download page that should be much more attractive and useful.