Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has announced a commitment to donate $120,000 to open-source developers on GitHub over the coming year. This translates to a monthly contribution of $10,000, aimed at supporting smaller open-source projects that are crucial for the development and maintenance of Canonical’s products.
The donations are facilitated through the thanks.dev platform, which evaluates Canonical’s GitHub code to identify the external projects and libraries upon which its development relies. The donations are then distributed based on the frequency of use of these dependencies.
Since the initiative began in April, Canonical has already provided funding to more than 350 GitHub projects essential for its operations, including tools like linters and coverage checkers such as coverage.py and contributions to the Pallets Project. Notably, developer Sindre Sorhus has also benefitted from this outreach.
While the financial amounts allocated aren’t particularly large, the significance lies in acknowledging the efforts of open-source developers, as highlighted by Canonical’s Ben Hoyt: "While very few open-source developers do it for the money, the feeling of being recognised… has real meaning for an open-source creator."
The thanks.dev platform retains a 5% commission for its role in analyzing software dependencies and identifying eligible developers. Canonical has adjusted donation weights according to the usage of various programming languages.
Although Canonical has historically supported larger open-source initiatives like the Eclipse Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, this new effort to support smaller projects is commendable. These smaller projects, while often less visible, play a vital role in the software ecosystem, revealing Canonical’s acknowledgment of the foundational work done by countless open-source contributors.