FAQ
How do open source donations work?
Each item you buy one of our products, a fixed amount will be allocated to each of the projects we support. This is each individual item of your order, not per order. This amount will be split between the projects and go to their respective pots once the product has gone past it’s refund window. At the end of every month we will donate the money from each pot to the projects.
Will you ever add new projects to donate to?
Yes! We plan to rotate projects around to ensure not all our money ends up on the same projects. However, we also want to make sure that we can contribute a noticeable amount to these projects and not dilute our effectiveness too much.
Can you donate to my project?
Possibly! We need to be careful about whom we support, and we want to do the best job we can at working together with our beneficiaries to make the greatest possible impact. So we can’t guarantee we’ll be able to work with you soon. We have lots of ideas for how to scale this as we grow, but those will need to wait. Feel free to contact us…
Why did you choose project X/Y/Z?
Our reasoning for choosing each project we support is detailed in the various blog posts we have written. But in general we choose based on a number of factors:
- A structured process for taking donations and well-thought-out plans for how to use donations
- A high quality product
- Not owned or controlled by a for-profit company (we don’t just want to add to a CEO’s bonus)
- A medium to large user base
Why start a clothing brand of all things?
Our mission is to enable the collective drive of the tech community to support the hard thankless work of open source contributors everywhere. To do this we need a banner to wave to tell everyone about the mission we are on. We want to underthread the tech community and build a brand who has no conflict of interest in promoting open source software and high quality tech content. To build an incentive structure which points only at adding positive value in everything we do. We don’t want to bring a specific agenda along with us.
Not only this, but in terms of clothing, we want to represent ourselves and those like us. We are passionate software engineers, and believe the field deserves a better image. This goes beyond wearing T-shirts with cheap code snippets or snarky quips. We look for clean quality in our code and in our look too - no gimmicks, just passed tests and efficient code.
Why the name Underthreaded?
In brainstorming a name to match our vision for the brand, the co-founders actually came up with this name at exactly the same time, and we both absolutely love it. The word thread is obviously both heavily tied to software and clothing, but we love how it also brings to mind the word understated, which we think nicely captures our brand’s self-image. We want to “underthread” the software community in a non-trivial but subtle way which doesn’t distract from the core of what software engineering is about, or not about.