Hi all,
(Not sure this is the right place to post this)
Spotify has announced their FOSS fund to support some of their dependencies. Projects chosen by their engineers will be announced in May.
Cheers, Camille
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Definitely the right space! This is great!
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This looks interesting! Without third-party involvement, the company connects with Maintainers. A good step toward sustainability.
I couldn’t find how to apply a project for the fund. Anybody knows?
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From what I understand, the projects are chosen internally: nominated by their staff and selected by the fund committee.
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I guess they’re funding the projects that are recommended or used by Engineering team!
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It would be wonderful if Spotify used this as a chance to finally give back to open source dependencies they use in their core product, like MusicBrainz data.
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There’s more that could be asked, too.
We will target projects that are independent, actively maintained, and aligned with our company values.
What do they mean by independent? Kubernetes is listed as a project which isn’t - but it’s still an open source project that needs funds, even if CNCF runs that aspect for them (unless I am missing something). I also don’t know what they mean by “actively maintained”, or “aligned with our company values”. Most OSS code does not have a values statement by which it can be judged. Spotify itself has a checkered history - including with funding. According to NYT, only 13k out of 7 million musicians received over $50k in 2020 (Wikipedia NYT Source).
We also want to be sure to provide this support to important dependencies in our stack. To do this, we will collect dependencies across our internal repositories to map the most widely used third-party projects.
I wonder how far down the stack they are going.
Anyone know if Per Ploug (@DuaneOBrien ?) would be willing to talk to us about this?
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I completely agree that they should expand more on “actively maintained” repositories. In fact, it should not be limited. I’m trying to connect with Per Ploug and post here if there’s any update.
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Glad that more companies are funding open source projects. I wonder if we can see a future where certain open source projects can act as the R&D center of major corporations like Spotify. This could be a win-win relationship between contributors who want to “scratch an itch” and companies with the financial resources but not the bandwidth to explore new ideas.
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