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I'd advise you reach out to the maintainers of some of your favourite projects and ask for their help in finding good candidates for grants. Or do what Stripe
by shazow 12y ago
I'd advise you reach out to the maintainers of some of your favourite projects and ask for their help in finding good candidates for grants.
Or do what Stripe did and put out a call for applications/proposals.
Another thing you could try is giving your engineers a quarterly/yearly budget to allocate to OSS projects, then they could do things like Gittip.
Either way, we need more companies trying these kinds of things so we have a better idea of what works. :)
- ak217 12y ago> Another thing you could try is giving your engineers a quarterly/yearly budget to allocate to OSS projects I'd expand on that by pointing out the following: Your company's engineers are almost certainly using open-source projects on a daily basis, and finding bugs or missing features in those projects. Often in such a situation the engineer has no time to code the missing feature, much less see it through an upstream pull and release, so they will hack up a quick internal fork or custom rewrite. Ask your team that if they find themselves in such a situation, to bring the project and feature as a candidate for your grant. For example, as Andrey mentioned in the blog post, he recently pulled code from Kevin Burke to add customizable retry support to urllib3. That's something my employer could use, but we'd need to add support for the 503 Retry-After header (which we added in-house). I'll be bringing that up as a possible grant with my employer, to incorporate that feature upstream so we can just use it through urllib3.