Hi all.

I hate to be in this position, but I need some help with slackware.uk's future.

The main server was renewed by the sponsor, File Away (who I can't thank enough for their support over the past 10+ years) at the beginning of this month for another year, but I was also told at the same time that they would no longer be able to sponsor the server going forward.

This has left me in quite a difficult situation as I'll need to either find a new sponsor or ask the community for more donations in order to fund the server without sponsorship.

I truly appreciate all the people who donate via Patreon, PayPal or the GoFundMe campaign (all linked from the front page of https://slackware.uk/) and I hate to have to ask the community for more support than they currently give, but the donations coming in at the moment won't cover the costs of renewing the server next year

So, I'm asking for your help guys.

Firstly, if you work for a company that may be open to sponsoring the server (and getting some free advertising out of it!), please can you put me in touch with the appropriate people? Or if know of a company that uses Slackware that may be approachable directly, give me a heads up on their name and I'll drop them an email.

Sponsorship would be my preferred method of funding the server, as asking the community for more support is something I hate to do when you guys have kindly given so much already.

But, that being said, if I can't find a sponsor starting from next year, without the support of the community slackware.uk may have to close its hosting and mirroring services

This is something I really don't want to happen, obviously. The project has supported the Slackware community for nearly 20 years and is the primary host for many Slackware projects including SlackwareARM, MSB, CSB, Slint and many more, and mirrors other major projects to provide super-fast access for everyone around the world.

If you have the means, and use slackware.uk or want to support a Slackware project, I would genuinely appreciate any donations or regular patronage you could offer. I don't want anyone to stretch themselves fiscally - looking after yourself and your family is always the most important thing - but if you have a few spare £s, $s or pennies that you could throw towards the project, we may be able to keep things going in the absence of a new sponsor.

I just want to make it clear that I don't take ANY money that is donated for personal gains - slackware.uk has a separate bank account which donations go into and is used to only pay for costs related to the project. I support the servers myself in my spare time and try to keep things up and running as much as possible (which sometimes involves me getting alerts of httpd failures in the middle of sleeping!).

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and for any donations or sponsorship you can offer. If you have a suggestion for a sponsor to replace File Away, even if it's unlikely to succeed (it never hurts to ask, and I've been surprised before), please do let me know. You can either reply here, drop me an email (darren (at) slackware (dot) uk), or PM me directly on Libera.chat IRC.

Feel free to post this note into your own community forums, mailing lists or websites - the wider this is distributed the better chance of slackware.uk continuing for many years to come.

Hopefully with new sponsorship or community support going forward, we can keep slackware.uk going for another 20 years

Cheers!

Once Akamai completes the acquisition of Linode, I'll have a chat with some people and see if we can provide some resources.

7 members found this post helpful.

Just sent a few bucks you way, hopefully it helps.

2 members found this post helpful.

Tossed in a few quid / month for now, hope it'll help!!
And of course, keep the server/site going for "another 20 years"

2 members found this post helpful.

Thanks Stuart

We really should get blind drunk again next time you're up this way!

Thank you to people who have donated so quickly - I really appreciate it

1 members found this post helpful.

Just sent a few dollars, but will put a reminder on my phone to send some more at the beginning of next month.

2 members found this post helpful.

I sent you what I have via paypal. I hope i find a job soon to sent more for slackware.uk and Patrick also...

2 members found this post helpful.

tadgy,

how much money do you need?

How much traffic per month (in Gigabyte) do you get on average? I imagine it's a lot more than normal right now.

The main server was renewed last month for just under $1.1k - it may be a little higher next year, but probably not by a huge amount.

There is also the seedbox server, which is sponsored separately by UK2, that is due for its yearly sponsorship renewal right now. I'm waiting to hear back from UK that they want to continue that agreement... so things may be tougher than I thought if they don't want to....

Cheers.

3 members found this post helpful.

It varies month by month, but the average over the last year is about 12 TiB/month - but the bandwidth limit for the server is 20 TiB/month and sometimes gets close to that.

The seedbox server is a lot less than that given the distributed nature of Bittorrent.

Hey tadgy,

I just sent a few bucks your way. I hope you're able to get a new sponsor.
Cheers, mate!

1 members found this post helpful.

My best friend told me (verbatim):

"Ok peut le faire. Mais il faut m’en dire plus"

note:
The question I asked him, was:
"Do you sponsor open-source projects ?"

@tadgy
I sent you a PM

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi Tadgy,

I upped my tier on Patreon - I appreciate all you do for the Slackware community!