Modern infrastructure relies on a variety of open source projects. To help maintain and support these projects and the developers behind them, many companies and non-profits have launched open source funds that allow company employees to nominate the projects they rely on (or participate in) every day. Open source software projects. This allows the Open Source Fund to identify open source projects that are important to the company and encourage its employees to participate more directly in the company’s funding decisions.

For example, Google, which everyone is familiar with, has implemented an open source reward program called “Open Source Peer Bonus”, which aims to reward external open source contributors nominated by Google employees and commend these external open source contributors for their special contributions to open source. contribute.

A few days ago, Bloomberg announced the establishment of its first FOSS Contributor Fund (FOSS Contributor Fund), and launched the first round of employee voting.

The goals of philanthropy and open source code are very similar. Both focus on building community and using your talents and resources for the public good. The FOSS Contributor Fund provides access to Bloomberg’s unique resources and connects our engineers to our culture of giving back.

As planned, Bloomberg has set up a quarterly voting system for its FOSS Contributor Fund, awarding up to three projects with $10,000 each in each voting cycle. In the first round of nominations, Bloomberg invites nominations and votes from employees who work in the company’s engineering, data and product departments, as well as the CTO’s office. Following the initial nomination period, a scoring criteria was also developed to identify five projects as finalists.

Following a final vote, three open source projects that are integral to Bloomberg have been selected as recipients of the company’s inaugural FOSS Contributor Fund, including:

Alyssa Wright of Bloomberg said:

Project selection and scoring criteria will continue to be adjusted as new FOSS funds develop better ways to impact important projects over the long term.

While financial support is important, we can also provide things like code, community work, documentation, mentorship, and other types of contributions in a multi-pronged way to support the various open source projects we rely on.