Inspired by Sentry's Open Source Pledge initiative, we're updating our approach to open source funding.
Starting this month, we're giving $5,000 per full-time developer per year to the open source projects that power Buttondown. (We technically actually give more than this, at the moment, but as we start to hire a few more full-time folks this will be a useful ratchet to keep us pushing forward our commitments.)
You can see an itemized list of our commitments on our Open Source page, which additionally lists all of the open source projects that we use and are not funding (but should be, and soon!)
Our logic for identifying which projects to fund was fairly anodyne:
- Bias against projects that are owned by for-profit entities, most of which do not accept sponsors anyway (Tailwind, Next, Tiptap, etc.)
- Bias towards projects that are particularly load-bearing to our business (Python, ProseMirror, etc.)
- Bias against "tip-jar" style donations of <$100/year in favor of being able to make slightly larger commitments that will hopefully be more impactful.