The Annual Open Source grant

Starting from 2018, we're starting a program we call The Annual Open Source grant where every year we will have an amount that we allocate to be given to open source projects.

At the end of spring, the engineering team will get together and decide which project and how much money each project will receive from the grant. The engineering team will choose, among others, which project have had an impact to us and our customers and then decide how much of the grant to be given to each of the project.

The focus

What we want to focus on are two things:

• Acknowledgement of the work done by the people of a particular open source project
• And the viability and continuity of this program and not how large or small the amount that we can afford

In this small way, we would like to show that even small companies like us can manage to give back and acknowledge the hard and good work that many folks of the open source community have sacrified their time and energy on.

Hope to inspire

Hopefully, this will inspire and start more similar programs within other small companies: If you have earned because your customers have acknowledged the value that you bring to them, then we believe we should also ackowledge the value that the open source community have helped us to bring to our customers. Be it a hundred or a million in a year, let's put our money where our hearts are.

Grant recipients for 2018

For 2018, we have allocated USD1500 to be distributed to open source projects that the engineering team have chosen.

Django REST Framework (DRF)

We have allocated USD600 for Django REST Framework (DRF) by subscribing to their basic plan for the whole year.

DRF is core to our services, and without it we might have needed to divert around 20% or more of our engineering resources to build something similar for our own use.

PyPI, The Python Package Index

We have contributed USD600 to PyPI, the Python Package Index

Packaging managers are the backbone for any programming language ecosystem. Other platform like Nodejs NPM or PHP Composer are very well funded so it goes without saying for the Python community to keep PyPI running and improved.

Requests 3.0

We have contributed USD300 to Requests 3.0

We're using this library internally but as an API provider, our customers probably will also be using it in their implementation. Continued support to the development of this library will in the long run help our customers as well.

There were a few more projects that the team would like to contribute too but unfortunately they couldn't find an explicit donation channel from their websites. Among them - buildout, httpie, pelican and sphinx.

You can check out our 2019 Open Source grant recipients here

P.S: Thank you to Beth Kanter for the open source your love thumbnail.