Announced on Monday, Apr. 25th, via the company's internal blog, Spotify is setting aside €100,000 for its new support fund entitled Free and Open Source Software Fund (FOSS Fund). The money is intended to aid specific open source development projects and is Spotify's way of targeting more free and open source concepts to better the world of technology.
Spotify explained within its blog post that its own in-house Spotify developers and engineers will be choosing the projects that will receive monetary support. The FOSS Fund will only thus far contain within the aforementioned €100,000, but Spotify aims to raise that number over the next several years into the Fund's lifecycle, as open source tech lead under Spotify, Per Ploug, details the number as only "a starting amount." The Fund's own committee will be responsible for selecting the final selections, all of whom will be announced next month.
Open source software is typically free and has its entire source code available to the public, allowing for alternative creators, developers, engineers, and more to enhance the software even further, use it in other forms of software, and more. A perfect example of open source software is OBS, which literally stands for Open Broadcast Software, a tool that more than most Twitch and YouTube streamers utilize to stream to their millions of followers.
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Spotify itself runs on a multitude of open source software concepts, as do many alternative tech companies, including Adobe, Facebook, GitHub, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and plenty more. As you can already tell, open source software is essentially the lifeblood of evolving technologies. Without open source considerations, many of the most recognizable tech firms across the globe wouldn't exist today, thus Spotify's FOSS Fund is certainly one of merit.
"Spotify uses open source software to power the best audio experience for creators and listeners around the world. In fact, we are like many other tech companies who rely on open source. And yet, open source developers often make these projects available for us to use without compensation. That is why today we are announcing the Spotify FOSS Fund, with the purpose of donating money and bringing attention to independent open source projects," writes Spotify in its blog post. "These projects support and enable our engineering teams to do their best work, and we want to recognize that."
The company announced several additional details about its forthcoming FOSS Fund, main among them being that it will focus on projects that are independent and still consistently maintained. Nominations will be informed via Spotify's own dependency data repositories. The Fund nominations will also disallow open source projects that were created or run by current and former Spotify employees.
The money within the Fund will go towards aiding the project in a number of different ways. The most noticeable aspect for the financial support will be witnessed via increased marketing efforts, as well as amending current security flaws in certain projects if necessary. The Fund will also be intended to simply maintain said projects over time, allowing them a full enough future with support backed by the likes of Spotify's own internal engineers.
In tandem with this news, Spotify likewise has joined up with the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) in the hopes of broadening more support for the ecosystem of open source cybersecurity measures. Its FOSS Fund, according to Spotify, will ensure both sustainability and growth for additional software solutions across the board. Its nearly 200 own internal open source platforms prove the incredible necessity in broadening support for the open source ecosystem.
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Written by Ryan Epps
