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How to effectively direct corporate money to FOSS? (piefed.social)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/foss@beehaw.org
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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,

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[–] 14 points 1 month ago* (2 children)

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.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    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.

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