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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

I've often asked how my company could support them. Most I ask don't understand the question. Those that do only point out that I can contribute code changes - which I have but rarely as we pick good projects that meet our needs: there rarely are bugs or features we would care about enough to not do our regular work.

what would be nice is a non profit that would take money and distribute it to the projects we use - likely with some legal checking that they are legal (whatever that means). FSF is the only one I know of that does generic development and they have ideas that companies generally oppose and so are out

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A lot of open source maintainers are bad at asking for money, and most companies find it very hard to give money away without some kind of formal arrangement in place.

Here's a way you can work around that, if you are someone who works for a company with money:

Contact the maintainers of software you use and invite them to speak to your engineering team via Zoom in exchange for a speaking fee.

Your company knows how to pay consultants. It likely also has an existing training budget you can tap into.

You're not asking the maintainer to give a talk - those take time to prepare and require experience with public speaking.

Instead, set it up as a Q&A or a fireside chat. Select someone from your own team who is good at facilitating / asking questions.

Aim for an hour of time. Pay four figures.

Then do the same thing once a month or so for other projects you depend on.

I really like the idea of normalizing companies reaching out to maintainers and offering them a relatively easy hour long remote consultation in exchange for a generous payment. I think this may be a discreet way to help funnel money into the pockets of people who's work a company depends on.

This is very creative, and I suspect would work.

It does have the side effect of wasting the time of 1+n engineers for that hour. I might be able to rustle up a few in month 1, but I'm not going to ba able to do it monthly.

Frankly, as long as the builder has a "support contract" option, that should be sufficient.

I will add that understanding how business works is a huge help to them to get you paid. I advocated for supporting a project (they have a "sponsored by" marketing on their web page, so we could take it out the marketing budget.) But they could only be paid via PayPal (which unfortunately we can't do) do the deal fell through.

It didn't help that the home page in question contained lot of sarcasm, and was antagonistic in tone, likely (I suspect) because of the nonsense the maintainer had to wade through. Ultimately no money got sent.

I'm happy to support OSS, but I can only spend so much social capital on doing so. My advice to maintainers, if you want sponsorship, put some effort into making that channel professional. It really helps.

Many projects have foundations or fiscal sponsors you can work with.

If you care about Python, you could support the Python Foundation, and/or hire or sponsor some Python developers. If you care about Rust, support the Rust Foundation, and/or hire or sponsor some Rust developers. If you care about Reproducible Builds, or QEMU, or Git, or Inkscape, or the future of FOSS licensing, or various other projects (https://sfconservancy.org/projects/current/), support Software Freedom Conservancy.

If you care about a smaller project, and they don't have a means of sponsorship, you could encourage them to accept sponsorship via some means, or join some fiscal sponsor umbrella like Conservancy.

Another such umbrella organization is Software in the Public Interest (SPI). Some of the more notable projects they sponsor include Arch Linux, Debian, FFmpeg, LibreOffice, OpenSSL, OpenZFS, PostgreSQL, and systemd.

Homepage: https://www.spi-inc.org/

I'd like if it was an option on github to easily have a billing option that would have an automatic donation to the open source in the active repos.

The Linux Foundation (LF) is sort of this. A non-profit aimed at corporate members to sponsor work on many open-source projects (~900).

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