Happy to read that F-Droid Awarded Open Technology Fund’s FOSS Sustainability Grant from F-Droid. via archive.is

Open source is playing an increasingly important role in today's world. The discussion on how to support and sustain the open-source community has been ongoing for years, and I'm delighted to see people taking action toward directly funding projects.

We are excited to announce that F-Droid has been awarded $396,044 from the Open Technology Fund’s FOSS Sustainability Fund. This grant is specifically designed to support free and open-source software (FOSS) projects in addressing long-term sustainability challenges, and we are honored to be among the recipients.

Congrats!

The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Sustainability Fund is supported by Open Technology Fund, which is a USA non-profit organization that works to advance internet freedom in repressive environments by supporting the research, development, implementation, and maintenance of technologies that counter censorship and combat repressive surveillance to enable all citizens to exercise their fundamental human rights online.

This organization supported many well-known open-source projects, including F-Droid, Let's Encrypt, and FileZilla. From its latest annual report for 2022, we can observe the following numbers: "Of the funds allocated for internet freedom, $27 million was designated for OTF through USAGM".

At the same time, The Sovereign Tech Agency which supports the development, improvement, and maintenance of open digital infrastructure and sponsored by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action has been allocated 13 million Euros for its projects in 2022.

Apart from the country's funding efforts, the industry has also launched a campaign called Open Source Pledge. Its message is super clear that: "Whether you're a CEO, CFO, CTO, or just a dev, your company surely depends on Open Source software. It's time to pay the maintainers."

The action is simple to understand:

• Pay Open Source maintainers: The minimum to participate is $2,000 per year per developer at your company.
• Self-report annually: Each year, publish a blog post outlining your payments to maintainers.

Open Source Pledge reported that over the past year, they have paid $2.5 million to maintainers. That's a really great number to be aware of.

I hope more and more countries or companies will join this effort.