Revision of Good news and better plans from Thu, 11/22/2018 - 12:35

We write today to announce a great milestone for the Trisquel GNU/Linux project.

We've been honored as one of the recipients of the Handshake Free and Open Source Software Community Grant, an amazing initiative of the Handshake Project which means that the Trisquel Association has received an USD 100.000 donation.

These funds have their origin on the contributions received by the Handshake project from their sponsors, which were pledged to be distributed among Free and Open Source Software projects and come with no strings attached.

For those who are new to the Handshake project, you can read more here about this amazing alternative to the role of Certificate Authorities in the DNS protocol which makes the root zone (and hence the whole system) uncensorable, permisionless and free of gatekeepers.

We've decided to begin to use these funds along with those from the many and very generous donations of our community to provide a couple of paid positions to long-time members of the project: its creator and main developer Ruben Rodriguez and the websites and community lead David Rodriguez. We had already started a similar approach between October 2014 and May 2015 which was interrupted once Ruben started to work full-time for the FSF.

The details of time dedication and salary are not yet finalized but will be published here once we start with this new phase. Providing these paid positions will allow us to focus more consistently on the tasks that we've been working on through all these years, get up-to-speed with other long-neglected ones and also to realistically take on loftier goals.

Looking towards the future, we may be extending this idea with other paid positions, most probably to help with the development tasks. We'll also inform here about any such advances and we'll make sure to take accountability seriously and give more frequent status updates, both through this blog and at the Freedom Fridays IRC meetings.