November 2021
Intermediate to advanced
48 pages
58m
English
Content preview from Investing in Open Source: The FOSS Contributor Fund
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Chapter 7. Beyond the FOSS Fund
The FOSS Contributor Fund is a useful framework for you to invest in the open source software your organization uses every day. Running a FOSS Fund will deepen your connections to projects you depend on, give you insights into the open source culture at your organization, and—most importantly—bring new perspectives to bear on your open source funding decisions. By democratizing this process, you’re also bringing people within your company together to make important decisions.
In the three years we’ve been running our FOSS Fund at Indeed, we’ve found ourselves asking new questions that have opened up new avenues of exploration and fresh investigations. We plan to cover some of them in a subsequent Investing in Open Source report, but for the moment, here are a few of the questions we’re thinking about.
Should We Focus on Funding Projects or Funding People?
A single open source maintainer might do incredibly valuable work—supporting dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of small open source projects. Those projects might not be large or important enough to win a FOSS Fund vote by themselves, but they are valuable, and we think the work of those maintainers deserves recognition and support. That’s why, at the beginning of 2021, we launched a new program to identify and fund specific individuals who have an outsized impact on the open source we use every day.
How Can a FOSS Fund Help You Invest in Your Open Source at Scale?
Your organization depends ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.