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Ask HN: Hardware Donations for Open Source?

2 points by wbond ↗ HN
I run an open source PHP project and am looking to add OS X testing to the project. Are there any resources for finding people willing to donate hardware to open source projects? Does anyone here have a spare Apple machine they'd like to donate?

For those interested, Flourish is currently tested on 10 different Linux, BSD and Windows environments: http://flourishlib.com/docs/Tests.

4 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 26.8 ms ] thread
kierank
You might be able to get away with just testing it on Darwin.
jolan
Put up something on your webpage asking for donations. I'm an OpenBSD developer and have received many hardware donations over the years due to the OpenBSD hardware donation page.

Honestly though, if it's just PHP then the FreeBSD tests should cover Mac OS X since the posix bits are taken from FreeBSD.

wbond
I suppose I should post something on the homepage - right now it is only listed on the support page.

I'm looking to specifically test on OS X since I do deal with some command-line programs and there have been differences between OS X and FreeBSD.

frossie
It is definitely possible, eg. see the Gentoo adopt-a-developer program.

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/userrel/adopt-a-dev/

But it might be more efficient to just ask for monetary donations from your users and then use it to buy something off eBay. There are a lot more people with $5 to spare than a spare Mac.

You might also want to motivate people with something like Chip In http://www.chipin.com/ depending on your feelings on the evilness of Flash :-)