Canonical has committed to donating $120,000 (around £90,000) to open-source developers on GitHub over the next 12 months.
Ubuntu’s maker say a cool $10k a month is to be distributed to smaller open-source projects (tools, libraries, dependencies, etc) which Canonical developers rely on to develop, fix, fine-tune and maintain the company’s own apps, services and websites.
The thanks.dev platform is powering this community-focused outreach. It analyses Canonical’s GitHub code to discern the external projects, libraries and tools whose code used, with funds split based on how often a dependency is used.
Since kicking off in April, Canonical has already opened its wallet to over 350 GitHub projects it relies on for its operations, ranging from linters to coverage checkers to code assists – coverage.py, the Pallets Project, and macOS app dev1 Sindre Sorhus already benefitting.
While the amounts of money involved here aren’t huge—here’s a list of who got what so far—the gesture in ‘putting its money where its code is’ (to butcher a well-worn saying) is important, as a write up of the initiative by Canonical’s Ben Hoyt notes:
While very few open source developers do it for the money, the feeling of being recognised, knowing that someone cared enough to show it, has real meaning for an open source creator.
Ben Hoyt, Canonical software engineer
The thanks.dev platform takes a 5% commission for its part in the effort: analysing dependency trees (up to three levels deep) to identify developers. Hoyt says Canonical has tweaked the donation weights at a programming language level to better reflect its usage.
Canonical is no stranger to funding open-source projects, but they tend to be major ones: Eclipse Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), GNOME.
Smaller projects may have less public visibility and so garner less recognition, but they are often as integral to day-to-day running – silent dependencies, in a sense.
Which makes this effort by Canonical a terrific one.
After all, big tech was built on the shoulders of the little people in open source.
- Sindre also creates a ton of nifty open-source CLI tools, npm packages, etc that all kinds of developers, projects and companies make use of – including Canonical. ↩︎