You Can Buy OSS Merch

I recently made my first1 donation to an OSS project. Now I’m the proud owner of a tqdm2 shirt!

I noticed their merch store reading through the tqdm docs. “Merch for a Python library?” I wondered. Apparently so! They sell hats and shirts and mugs.


A tqdm snapback hat, mug, and shirt

I was delighted to discover this and really tickled by the nerdiness of repping a progress bar library. Since I am such a tqdm fan, I bought a shirt. It’s awesome. Now it’s in my nighttime rotation, next to AJR and Sungazer and a variety of John Green’s mustachioed faces.

This discovery inspired me to do some research, and I was surprised at how many other projects also have merch to sell. There are several stores (Freewear, The Grindhouse, HelloTux, Commit Goods), that handle the logistics of sales so maintainers can focus on maintaining. Other stores seem independent, like tqdm’s or Neovim’s.

I’m certainly not going to claim that merch is a grand solution to the OSS sustainability crisis. I’ll just leave you with this: If there’s some software you love, they might be selling shirts.


The author smiling and giving a double thumbs up outdoors, wearing his tqdm shirt

Footnotes

  1. Writing this post got me thinking about why I’d never donated before, despite the absolute pervasiveness of XKCD 2347, frequent conversations about the unsustainability of OSS maintenance, and inspiring stories about many small donors helping to make ambitious projects possible. It’s hard to say. I’m a sucker for a Wikipedia donation campaign. Maybe the OSS software I use the most in my personal life (like Python, for example) has never felt in need to me? ↩

  2. tqdm is a little progress bar library and I love it. I use it at home. I use it at work. I tell my friends about it. When I’m writing code for fun, I often write some nonsense that seems to hang, and I will invariably slap a tqdm.tqdm in there to see just how slowly my nonsense is running. tqdm lets me know that I only have to wait 45 more seconds. Or that it’s going to be three hours and I should probably optimize. It makes it so easy to get good insights in a pretty package. ↩