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Pay-it-Forward

Talent Bazaar

LAB0 Is an Open Source Project / Collective that operates like a bazaar — messy, alive, collaborative — where many minds and experiments interact in the open, and each new deployment stands on the shoulders of the last. We see LAB0 as an open source collective: people, projects, and hardware loosely joined, all improving together in public.

Our model is heavily influenced by the ideas in Eric S. Raymond’s "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and Richard Stallman’s GNU and free software principles. Instead of a closed, top-down "cathedral" approach, LAB0 works like a bazaar of talent and tools: small pieces, shared early, improved often, and given back to the community. People who benefit from the work contribute what they can so we can keep prototyping for makers, farmers, founders, and problem-solvers.

“Think of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech,’ not as in ‘free beer.’”
-Richard Stallman

Why Donations Matter

Edge AI belongs to the people and should live where real work happens: farms, factories, greenhouses, shops, and homes.

Prototyping should push past "good enough" toward solutions that are simple, reliable, and profitable.

Today’s tools make tomorrow’s problems easier and faster to solve.

Every dollar keeps printers running, lasers burning, the Edge AI Foundry online, sensors reporting, and code shipping.

We follow the Red Hat Open Source Business Model

Pay What You Can Afford

There is no fixed price to work with LAB0 R&D. If we helped you launch, prototype, or scale, consider paying it forward based on:

  • The value the tools or support created for you.

  • Your current stage: idea, prototype, production, scale.

  • What you can realistically afford while sustaining your own work.

Donation Types

  • One-time — For solving a specific problem or shipping a discrete project.

  • Monthly or yearly — When LAB0 underpins ongoing monitoring, maintenance, or automation.

Some can give a little, some a lot — all of it matters. There’s no required amount, only an open invitation to keep the chain going.

Where Your Donation Goes

  • Technology stack — New frameworks, better data pipelines, improved tooling, more robust hardware platforms.

  • Software + models — Training, fine-tuning, and deploying AI for real-world tasks: decision support, vision, control, automation.

  • Prototyping — Turning rough ideas into tested prototypes and production-ready systems with real ROI.

  • Edge infrastructure — Building the hardware, networks, and services that keep AI running as close to the work as possible.

Thank You

To everyone who has donated: thank you. Your contributions turned experiments into working systems and "what if" conversations into deployed edge AI. To those considering a donation: thank you for even asking the question.

We Thank you for supporting LAB0 and helping us keep building the future of edge AI compute, one project at a time.

"LAB0 an Open Source project exists because people like you chose to pay it forward."
— Shawn