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The middle of the month is, as usual, the time when we send our donations to open source projects and charity organizations.

This month, we planned to support the Sphinx Search project, an open source seach engine that we recently used  when we were developing a new version of the food blog aggregator site ZPierwszegoTloczenia.pl. However, it turned out the developers of Sphinx do not accept donations, but they suggested we could help the project by purchasing the book “Introduction to Search with Sphinx”, published by O’Reilly.

We did as they suggested and bought a copy of the book for our team, and a couple more to give away to other web developers that we know who might be interested in the subject.

As always, besides supporting an open source project, we’re also making a donation to a charity organization. This month we’re donating to the Animal Shelter in Pabianice, more specifically – we’re virtually adopting one of their dogs, a small fellow by the name of Kiwi. Stay strong, Kiwi!

Today, as we do every month, we send our donations to a selected open source project and a charity organization.

This time the choice of project and organization to support was made by Marcin Tabaka. Marcin is not a member of our core team (he runs his own web development company Internet Tea Group), but he has been working with us on numerous projects in the last few years, and since the cooperation has always been great, we invited him to take part in this little initiative of ours.

Per Marcin’s choice, the open source project that we support this month is Git, the distributed version control system. Our team has been using it as the default version control system for the last few years. We used mostly Subversion in the past, but ever since we started working with Git and got to know its advantages, we’ve been using it for all of our new projects.

We’re also making a donation to the Patient Aid Association for Sarcoma, an organization devoted to supporting the treatment of tumor diseases, including sarcoma. Marcin has been helping the Association for more than a year (among other things, his company developed a new website for the Association) and he praises it as an effective organization that truly helps the patients. We are happy to give them this little bit of support.

It’s time for our monthly donations to open source projects and charity organizations. This month the project and organization to support have been selected by Arek (who is currently enjoying a week of vacation – greetings from the rest of the team, we’re expecting a postcard!).

The first of this month’s donations goes to the jQuery Foundation, which provides support for the jQuery library project. This choice is hardly surprising, as in the past couple of years we haven’t developed a single website or web application that would not use jQuery.

Our second donation is to the “little brothers of the Poor” Association, committed to helping elderly people and relieving isolation and loneliness among the elderly. The Association is a member of the International Federation of little brothers of the Poor, and has been active in Poland since 2002.

We send our best wishes to the developers of jQuery and the jQuery Foundation, and to all the members and volunteers of the “little brothers of the Poor” Association.

In keeping with our tradition, 15th of every month is the day we make donations to open source projects and other good causes. This time the receivers of our donations have been selected by Karol.

The open source project that we are supporting this month is Kohana, a PHP web framework for building applications in the MVC pattern. This was a natural choice for Karol, who is a contributor to the Kohana project and an avid advocate of it.

We also send a donation to “Pies na zakręcie” (literally translated as “Dog on a bend in the road”), which is a group of volunteers that help homeless animals, belonging to the “Asylum of the Canine Angel” Foundation.

Greetings and best wishes to the Kohana project team and the volunteers of “Pies na zakręcie”!

It’s been a month since we started the initiative of regularly supporting free and open source software with small donations, so it’s time to do it again. Same as before, we’re donating to a FLOSS project or organization, as well as to a non-software related charity.

We have decided that each month a different member of our team will be responsible for the selection of projects/organizations to support. This month, Krzysiek is doing the honors.

Our first donation goes to Python Software Foundation, the supporting organization behind the Python programming language, which is devoted to advancing and promoting the language, and backing up the international community of Python programmers. Although Python is not the primary language that we work with, we have used it on numerous occasions in different projects, both for web and desktop application development, with great results.

The second organization that we support this month is Fundacja “Medor”, a foundation based in Zgierz (Krzysiek’s home town) which helps homeless dogs and cats. With our donation, we are adopting (by means of virtual adoption) one of their dogs, named “Wafel” (waffle).

We send our warmest greetings to both foundations and we’re grateful for the care that they take of their creatures, whether these are dogs, cats, or Pythons.

We took a kind of a long break from blogging, but we’re back, and this post proves that the reports of our company blog’s death have been greatly exaggerated. So, good to be back, and we have a little announcement to make.

Our company has been in operation for nearly eight years, and through all that time we have mostly been using free and open source sortware. We have been using it both as tools in our work environment, and as platforms on which to build solutions for our clients. Free and open source software has always served us well and helped us develop more easily.

Now, we would like to give something back to the creators of open source software, who often work driven purely by passion and receive no compensation for their time and efforts, even though their work is used by thousands or even millions of users. We have decided that each month we will be donating a little amount of money to an open source project or an organization that promotes free and open source software.

We start this initiative with a donation to the FreeBSD Foundation, which supports the development of the FreeBSD operating system. We have been running FreeBSD on our company servers since the beginning of our existence (and at this very moment FreeBSD is serving you this post).

However, there’s more to life than just software, so we have decided that every month we will also donate the same amount of money to another good cause, not related to software. Today we are supporting “Przystan Ocalenie”, an animal rescue centre devoted to saving horses sold to slaughterhouses, and providing shelter for many animals that have suffered from human cruelty.

Best wishes to the FreeBSD Foundation crew and to all the people and animals at “Przystan Ocalenie”.