This past Tuesday, an earthquake of massive proportions struck near Port-au-Prince in Haiti. Measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale, this is one of the worst earthquakes in recent years. As a result of the initial quake and several aftershocks that followed, hundreds of thousands of people have lost their lives and Haiti is in ruins. Boston.com has some heart-wrenching images from the disaster area and The New York Times has a transcript of President Obama’s remarks about the earthquake.
Mike Piatek-Jimenez, an independent software developer who runs Gaucho Software, has announced that he will be donating all proceeds from the sale of his weather forecast application Seasonality for the rest of this month. If you wish to make a donation yourself, simply purchase a copy of Seasonality for $25 and the amount will be donated to the charity Partners in Health.
Inspired by Piatek-Jimenez’s generosity, Justin Williams of Second Gear Software is trying to get several Mac developers to commit to donating one day of sales to their favored charities working towards the same cause. More than 20 developers are already onboard and they’re planning to hold the event on January 20, this coming Wednesday.
Peter Berglund, of Balooba Software, has also vowed to donate all proceeds from the sale of his entire catalog of both iPhone and Mac OS X applications to the Red Cross for an undetermined amount of time. Once again, all you need to do to participate is purchase any of the several applications made by Balooba Software, which include Skip Ahead for the iPhone and Safari Prairiefire, Bubblegym, and Babylooba for Mac OS X.
Besides these channels, if you’d like to donate anything to a charity of your choosing, please pay a visit to Nick Zantop’s blog Itsjustlight.com and click on any of the several links published there to donate to the corresponding organization. If nothing else, you can simply text “HAITI” to 90999 and $10 will be deducted charged from your phone bill and donated automatically to the Red Cross, which has already collected over $3 million in this fashion.
Our hearts go out to all the people who’ve died or lost their loved ones in Haiti. We salute all the people who are contributing to this cause in any way they can and the Mac and iPhone developers mentioned above for their generosity. If your company is also donating its sales proceeds to similar charities, we welcome you to mention them in the comments section below.