It’s been six months of FlightGear accepting donations on OpenCollective, we wanted to give an update on how it’s going. The most important thing is to say thank you to everyone who has donated, especially with a recurring donation. Since we don’t want to ever spend more than we can afford each month, a small but recurring donation makes a big difference to our ability to plan.
We’ve so far used donations to cover long-standing expenses such as developer account subscriptions (needed for code-signing, especially), and server hosting which helps to give a more reliable download experience.
Hosting is tricky for FlightGear because of the large size of the data-sets, combined with a global user base. Both the scenery and aircraft data-sets are hundreds of gigabytes, and most hosting providers have limits which we reach rather easily.
In the past few months we’ve evaluated switching to a real content delivery network (CDN) for TerraSync, and the financial stability of the donations had made that a low-risk option and something we believe is economic for the long term: it’s costing approximately US$40 / month for all of TerraSync. Compared to the previous adhoc hosting, the CDN gives us global presence in every continent, which should make for a much better experience for users in South America and Asia especially.
(For those interested: for that US$40, the CDN served 6.5TB of traffic, across 83 million requests, split across data-centres in Paris, Frankfurt, Singapore, Chicago, Sao Paulo and Tokyo)
On the assumption we keep getting similar levels of financial support, we’re happy we can use the CDN for the future, even as we look towards a new FlightGear release based on our overhauled scenery pipeline (World Scenery 3.0), and a corresponding new iteration of our OpenStreetMap-derived urban data. (Of course we are keeping a fallback solution, if donations ever run low)
So again, thanks to everyone who’s donated, for making various long-standing problems become less troublesome. If you would like to make a donation, visit our donation page.