Thank you Ondřej! amazee.io funds contribution in Open Source

When I was seventeen years old I programmed my first open source online game. It was called “Hack the Net LAN” or “HTN.LAN”, forked from the slightly different (but also open source) game called “Hack the Net”, which was a browser-based online game.

To play, you start with a single computer which you can equip with better hardware and software and ultimately can hack other computers and make them your own.

While some games are always running, HTN.LAN restarted every week. Every Sunday I had to extract the player rankings and run database queries in order to restart the game. Even though I missed some Sundays, players still loved and played the game. The game was used so much that my hosting company eventually kicked me from the server. I was forced to buy my own root server and had to foot the bill all by myself.

My goal was to make a game, not to make money. I never figured out how to generate revenue from the game to cover server costs, so after a couple of months I had to stop. HTN.LAN was too much work and generated too high of costs for a seventeen year old.

Right now there are thousands of people out there in the open source world which have this exact problem. People with cool ideas or innovative tools, who are struggling to keep themselves and their technology alive.

At amazee.io our hosting stack is built on open source because we believe in open source. We want to support the deserving individuals in open source who make the tools and run the projects so they can continue to focus their attention on their work, not only keeping the lights on.

For this reason, amazee.io is pleased to announce that, beginning in June, we will be contributing every month to an open source project of our choice.

To kick off this support initiative, we’ve selected Ondřej Surý, of deb.sury.org. This project is used on each of our servers to install the newest versions of PHP. Without his project we, and many others, would spend countless hours manually installing PHP.

Thank you Ondřej, for your work building Ubuntu packages for PHP!

If you would like to to donate to Ondřej’s efforts you can find the donation links on his website: donate.sury.org