January 2020
Anupdated version of this can be found on our Treeware About Us Page.
We are proud to announce the launch of Treeware.
We have partnered up with Offset Earth, to plant trees & fund the world’s best climate crisis solutions. We chose Offset Earth because they operate transparently with a minimal service fee, which they use to spread the message through social marketing.
Treeware is a new category of software distribution, supporting a sustainable future. You've heard of commercial software, open-source, freeware software, now there's Treeware.
Many developers want to help make the world a better place, and not in a "Silicon Valley" way (making the world a better place, through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility), but in a real tangible way. Plenty of developers have a "buy me a coffee" button on their open-source projects as a way to offer a thank you to developers for their hard work, but with more and more developers looking to fight climate action, this button can cut out the middleman.
We have seen a big uplift in other methods like Patreon and GitHub Sponsors to get monetary support for the work you put into open-source projects.
Treeware began after James Mills and Phil Sturgeon were talking about Phil’s work on Protect Earth and his crazy solo European bike-tour fundraiser for Offset.Earth. James asked about a new “Buy me a tree” badge on one of Phils GitHub repositories, and in a spin on open-source Postcardware (made famous in the Laravel community by Freek from Spatie) the idea of Treeware was born.
We have built a website at treeware.earth which gives you all the information you need to get started and make your open-source project Treeware. We have also created a simple way for you to submit your packages once you have added the Treeware “conditions of use” text. We’re amassing a collective of packages built by awesome people in all corners of the world who want to use their skills to have a direct impact on climate action.
If you have an Offset Earth profile you can update the link to point to your own. This could be a personal account, or a business account, if you’re one of the many businesses joining up to offset their workforce. If you cannot afford the one coffee a month Offset Earth subscription, you can simply leave the default link in place to our Treeware profile. We understand that money is hard, but if you can find a Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, etc. subscription to cancel, this one will literally make the world a better place.