A little over a month ago I ran a small scale experiment to gauge the appetite for funding the improvement of core Linux technologies via crowd funding. This is something that I had wanted to support myself since I first heard about kickstarter but nothing ever arose, hence why I started my own campaign. The idea was simple, if funding was successful I would take two weeks leave from my day job and commit to two weeks working on the Mesa project. For those not familiar Mesa is the project that supplies the open source graphics card drivers for Linux, this is the type of Linux project which like the kernel itself receives the bulk of support from corporations such as Intel, RedHat, VMWare, etc. The challenge was on to disprove the myth that desktop Linux users want everything for free and are not willing to pay for improvements to their operating system.