I am regularly in a position to control how funds for tech projects are spent. For example, choosing cloud infrastructure and such. I want to direct as much funding as possible to FOSS or FOSS friendly projects. The amount of money that I have control over in the company is way more than I could ever donate.
For example, I want to fund Linux kernel development, Postgres, language maintainers, etc.
I can’t convince companies to donate outright, but I could get them to buy a license or choose a different cloud provider or database provider.
I’m looking for ways to get money to people making a difference through legitimate channels that I can use to push internally.
EDIT:
Summary of my favorite options so far,
One thing that’s important to understand is that this is going to be a non-starter for a FOSS project that isn’t a 501c3, for most companies, for legal reasons. Charitable giving to 501c3s is defensible spending because of the impact on taxes. (Yay Crapitalism!)
You’d probably have more success onboarding them as a contractor doing “implementation support”.
Also, imo big projects like Linux and postgres are doing fine, and it’s the small tool creators that need support.
Exactly the problem, except I end up in greedy companies often. Donations are harder to arrange than business contracts.
I like how some projects will allow free non-commercial use, but otherwise require a commercial license or an open-source maintenance fee to use commercially, like Inno Setup, WiX Toolset, etc. It’s honor-based with no real enforcement (so no dealing with serial number, or activation systems), it’s also not an outrageous amount of money and it keeps the project afloat.
Yeah those make my life easy because I can just set up billing for them.
I wish there was a cloud provider that literally just up charged 5-10% that went straight to donations.
If you’re willing to use OpenBSD, there’s OpenBSD.amsterdam as far as cloud providers go :^)
In all seriousness, they donate about 15-20% of what they charge you to the OpenBSD Foundation. I also like their service. Though again, they are OpenBSD-exclusive, so I can’t say I recommend the service for your use case (which seems Linux-focused) unless you really want to switch to OpenBSD.
SQLite also has licenses you can pay for as well as support contracts you can get, though not a cloud provider.
Unfortunately, I don’t really know of anything similar in the Linux world or in regards to other databases and cloud providers nowadays. I know DigitalOcean in particular decided to abandon all of their FOSS donations except towards Omarchy for some reason.
I do this too! I always wondered who shares this weird interest. I recently got our company to install LibreOffice on a TS due to MS licensing expenses. We’re doing a small donation (in comparison to MS fees) which I know will be appreciated vs expected.
Yeah. I just wish there was a “support plan” because companies are weird about donations. I do things like push for RHEL instances so fees get sent up to RedHat. I fully agree with the donation approach, but some cloud budgets hit 10-100k and I want that money going to good things 😅
Layperson who needs to learn more. But if I can use LibreOffice and Linux Mint so can any regular corporate user. Dip their toes in. Start with simple and familiar. Email client. Word processor, etc. If Linux, it has to look and feel like Windows, hence Mint. But my use and application cases are tiny. Let me offer two recommendations. Then a story.
- Steer money towards ditching applications people bitch about or are hard to maintain. I bet someone way smarter than me, out of anger, made a FOSS alternative.
- Donate to a FOSS specific funder that helps other nonprofits use FOSS. Trains them to replace Windows with Mint for instance.
Story time on 2.
When I was a professor, I worked with an institution that advised nonprofits. I would always ask to see their software costs. Not as bad as a corporate account probably, but saying, “How about zero here?” and firing up LibreOffice can help put money into programs and away from overhead. A small homeless shelter with 5 part time employees and one computer. Ditching a MS subscription saved them enough to do something like have better coffee in the morning.
You have no idea how impactful better coffee is for people struggling with houselessness and the people working to help them. True story.
I suggest the software freedom conservancy, to which I personally donate. They have an excellent corporate giving program as well
Tax wise, I need to be invoiced for services. Could just be “software consultions” or something vague. My ability to contribute goes up a lot once it’s a business contract.
