Spotify has announced an open source fund to help pay developers of independent projects.
The Free and Open Source Software Fund (FOSS) will help pay developers of projects that benefit everyone. The fund is starting with 100K EUR and Spotify’s engineers will nominate which FOSS projects should receive funds. Spotify’s fund committee will make the final selections and those will be announced next month.
Spotify says it uses open source software to help power its audio experience for both creators and listeners. “In fact, we are like many other tech companies who rely on open source. And yet, open source developers often make these projects available for us to use without any compensation,” Spotify adds.
The intention is for the Spotify FOSS fund to help keep open source projects alive and their engineers continuing development. Spotify says over the course of 2022, it will donate a total of 100K EUR to different open source projects. The funds will provide financial support for developers around the world, helping them maintain the projects, fix security vulnerabilities, and improve the code base.
Spotify says the starting open source funds are just that – a foundation for a continuation of the program. “We want to test and validate before we deploy more broadly. We’re using this initial amount to help us learn what kind of impact we can make,” Spotify adds. “We will target projects that are independent, actively maintained, and aligned with our company values.”
Spotify has also joined the Open Source Security Foundation to support open source security initiatives. The company says it is exciting about being a leading force for more recognition behind open source software.
Spotify Free and Open Source Software Fund – FOSS Fund Basics
- A 100K EUR ($106K USD) fund for 2022
- Money will be distributed to independent, open source projects
- Spotify developers will nominate which projects to include
- Nominations are also informed by dependency data across repositories
- The Spotify FOSS Fund committee will select final recipients
- That selection criteria includes being independently run by people not employed by Spotify, with active codebase, and will benefit from financial support