Investing in Open Source: The FOSS Contributor Fund

Introduction

Open source is many things. It’s the definition of a license. It’s a way of solving shared problems. It’s a community. It’s a project. It’s an experiment. It’s an ecosystem. But there is one thing that sits at the heart of open source:

People.

People write and interpret licenses, solve shared problems, run the experiments, and power the ecosystem. Without people, open source doesn’t work. Open source is intentionally, and necessarily, participatory.

One way to empower participation is through funding. Developer-to-developer and user-to-creator funding has experienced wonderful growth over the last 10 years, and some open source creators derive significant income through this kind of funding.

However, organization-to-project and company-to-creator funding is complex and needs goals and structure to be successful. We’re excited to share how Indeed has created a program to fund projects and developers, and we want to inspire you to develop a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Contributor Fund at your own organization.

Getting Involved in Funding Open Source

We started an open source program at Indeed because we wanted to do our part to help open source thrive, which means we want as many people participating as we can get—mindfully, intentionally, and authentically. We see the evidence of this type of participation everywhere in the open source community.

Project maintainers invest significant time and energy in making it easy to participate. They write detailed onboarding guides to give new contributors clear guidance on how to get started. They host hackathons, meetups, and community events to encourage project participation. They give talks, speak on podcasts, run livestream coding events, write blog posts, and so much more.

The community has changed the way it recognizes open source participation, looking beyond code contributors to honor organizers, designers, testers, translators, project managers, triagers, and many others. So it seems only natural that we also want more people to participate in deciding how best to fund open source projects.

Yet very few people within organizations make large funding decisions.¹ At most companies, major budgeting decisions are made well above the level of the typical end user of open source software. A senior leader in an organization decides where to allocate budget, with the best of intentions, based on their experiences and the experiences of their advisors. But it can be difficult for an individual developer or end user to advocate for the needs of a project that might be critical to them. We created the FOSS Contributor Fund to provide a way for individual developers and end users to advocate for the open source projects they use and want to support.

The FOSS Contributor Fund

In 2019, Indeed launched a new program to grow participation in funding decisions as much as we could possibly get. The FOSS Contributor Fund enables Indeed employees to help us decide which open source projects we support monetarily. Every month, anyone who participated in an open source project is eligible to cast a vote for one of the open source dependencies Indeed relies on. The winning project receives a $10,000 no-strings-attached donation to use as they know best.

We’ve learned a lot from running our FOSS Fund. We gained a deeper understanding about the open source that we use, how developers feel about open source, and how to increase the number of participants. We’ve found an effective way to distribute the decision-making process for funding open source projects—one that connects organizational funding decisions with end users and developers. We’ve built a funding process that’s transparent and invites participation. We’ve unlocked a new way to connect with open source advocates and identify software that is vital to the business but might otherwise go unnoticed by senior leaders.

Again, we want to inspire you to start your own FOSS Fund. This report will equip you with everything you need to propose, build, and sustain your own FOSS Fund. We will tell the story of Indeed’s three-year endeavor to build and implement a funding program that supports the open source community. And we will provide a detailed implementation framework for you to run your FOSS Fund effectively. We hope this work helps you invite open source participation at all levels of your own organization.

The FOSS Fund Blueprint

The FOSS Contributor Fund at Indeed is a living blueprint designed to evolve with iteration. We created this program to increase meaningful participation in open source and fund the open source community in sustainable, democratized ways.

We’ll introduce you to the components of the blueprint: project eligibility, voter eligibility, funding amounts, voting framework, and iteration. We’ll also provide insights from our own experiences to demonstrate how our goals guide our implementation of the FOSS Fund and why we believe such a dynamic approach is necessary. As you read about each of the blueprint components, we encourage you to consider how your own organizational goals would modify or work within this model.

Open source is people. Now, let’s look at how we can involve more of them in making funding decisions within your organization.

¹ We’re notably excluding dev-to-dev and user-to-creator funding from this conversation. Some open source creators derive significant income through this kind of funding, but that is outside the scope of this report. Our goal is to widen participation in organization-to-project and organization-to-developer funding decisions.