{"id":176849,"date":"2025-07-10T16:26:48","date_gmt":"2025-07-10T16:26:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/linuxiac.com\/?p=176849"},"modified":"2025-07-10T16:49:39","modified_gmt":"2025-07-10T16:49:39","slug":"bottles-team-needs-funding-to-sustain-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/linuxiac.com\/bottles-team-needs-funding-to-sustain-development\/","title":{"rendered":"Call for Support: Bottles Team Needs Funding to Sustain Development"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Bottles<\/a> have grown in popularity over the past few years \u2014 and for good reason. It is a free and open-source software that helps you run Windows applications and games on Linux using Wine, but with a much more user-friendly interface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead of dealing with complex Wine setups manually, Bottles organizes everything into \u201cbottles\u201d \u2014 isolated environments that you can easily configure for different apps or use cases, all via a convenient GUI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, the six-year-old project, born as a GTK front end for Wine, appears to have fallen into a familiar pattern we\u2019ve seen so many times with other open-source projects\u2014the kind of growing pains that emerge once the initial excitement fades. As the project grows, it\u2019s no longer just fueled by passion, and that\u2019s when real life\u2014and especially money\u2014start to play a bigger role. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In light of this, the maintainers of Bottles have published an unusually candid update on the project\u2019s finances and future direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a blog post titled “Bottles Needs You: A Transparent Look at the Project\u2019s Future<\/a><\/em>,” lead developer Mirko Brombin revealed that Bottles has now been downloaded more than three million times from Flathub alone; yet, monthly donations hover around \u20ac100\u2014barely enough to cover server bills, let alone sustain development time. Then he continued:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

The reality is that I, Mirko, can no longer dedicate as much time to Bottles as I\u2019d like. I have a family, a new home, a company to run, and strategic projects like Vanilla OS that require an enormous amount of time and have a direct impact on the future of the company itself. My time, like everyone\u2019s, is limited. And every hour I dedicate to Bottles is an hour I take away elsewhere, from something that could guarantee me a concrete return, or that simply concerns my private life, my serenity, my family.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

As we informed you in October 2023<\/a>, rather than adding new features to an aging codebase \u201cfull of patches, temporary solutions, [and] workarounds<\/em>,\u201d the team began a ground-up rewrite, marking<\/span> the next step in the evolution of Bottles, namely Bottles Next. However, it seems that things here will also happen a little slower than expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Next is the future of Bottles. We\u2019re talking about a backend rewritten from scratch, with a clear and modern vision. We\u2019re talking about new reusable libraries, designed to be modular and flexible. We\u2019re talking about a modern communication protocol between backend and frontend, more solid and easier to extend. But all of this needs one fundamental thing: time. And time, today, needs to be funded.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

So, what is the Bottles team asking for? Rather than a dramatic Wikipedia-style banner plea, the post makes a measured request: a few euros a month from even a small slice of active users<\/strong>. According to devs, those micro-subscriptions, combined with new sponsorship deals currently under negotiation, could fund part-time development hours and shorten the path to a stable Bottles Next release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For supporters who prefer corporate backing, Bottles already lists Hyperbit, Linode, JetBrains, and others as infrastructure sponsors; however, the maintainers stress that community funding remains essential for day-to-day operations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s also important to make one thing crystal clear: the Bottles project hasn\u2019t been shut down or abandoned. The real issue is that developers currently struggle to find a balance between their everyday life and the time and energy required for the project. So, for the moment, there\u2019s no workable solution in sight, which leads to a delay in its development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like I mentioned at the start, this is one of the tricky parts of open source. A great idea comes to life, built by passionate and talented developers, and it quickly attracts a strong following. But at some point\u2014usually when the project grows beyond a fun side gig and starts becoming a reliable, professional tool that lots of people depend on\u2014reality kicks in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s when you need developers who can fully dedicate themselves to it. And that boils down to one simple thing: they need funding to cover their living expenses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, I hope this unfortunate situation gets sorted out\u2014Bottles is genuinely an amazing piece of software. If you\u2019re in a position to help, that would be fantastic. You can do so by visiting the original blog post, where you\u2019ll find donation links at the bottom, or you can head straight over here<\/a> to contribute directly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Despite massive adoption, Bottles faces funding shortages. The team shares its reality and asks users to help shape the project\u2019s future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":176852,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,5],"tags":[5454,5591,1803],"class_list":["post-176849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-software","category-news","tag-bottles","tag-funding","tag-wine"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/linuxiac.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/linuxiac.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/linuxiac.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linuxiac.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linuxiac.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/linuxiac.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176849\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linuxiac.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/linuxiac.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linuxiac.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linuxiac.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}