Donation to Framasoft

When we at Mageia write blog posts and other announcements, we use a collaborative editing tool called Etherpad to draft the text.  In the past, the links to these draft documents were accessible from our mailing list archives and wide open for anyone to access.  Fortunately, we found a better way to do this thanks to Framasoft. Framasoft provides the excellent MyPads platform, which provides a folder to store multiple Etherpads with access control, title editing, and sorting by date and name. Having a single point of access for our draft documents has been a huge help to getting blog posts written and proofread, and has provided a way to keep track of what we have coming. In addition to this excellent service, Framasoft provides other services such as spreadsheets, mind–mapping, drawing, and undoubtedly some other tools that we will find useful in the future. A full list can be seen here. While Framasoft does host and offers free usage of these services, it should be noted that their main aim is to develop this platform for self-hosting, not to offer a hosted service.

It is to this end that we would like to announce a donation of €250 to Framasoft. It has always been one of the goals of Mageia to not only develop an excellent high-quality operating system and community surrounding the project, but also to help with the general development and support of Free and Open Source software in the wider community. It is excellent to be able to use and support an association like Framasoft. They offer fantastic services, and supporting them fits with the goals that Mageia has laid out since the beginning. You can read more about the Framasoft association here.

As a further note to this, we would like to look into hosting the Framasoft software on our own infrastructure in the future. Unfortunately, with the infrastructure administration resources we currently have available, our current priorities are the release of Mageia 6 and general upkeep. Further development of our infrastructure will have to take place in the future as time and resources allow. So, in the meantime, we hope that this donation will help to cover our usage of Framasoft’s services.