I think I’ve come up with a novel hack for the challenge of getting your company to financially support the open source projects that it uses: reach out to the maintainers and offer them generous speaking fees for remote talks to your engineering team.

The problem

Everyone agrees that open source projects deserve more financial support. Actually supporting projects can be surprisingly difficult though:

• Many projects don’t offer any clear mechanism for sponsoring them.
• More to the point: open source projects are often really bad at asking for or thinking about money—it’s rarely a core competency!
• Projects that do often get the tiers wrong: a $5/month “buy a coffee” GitHub sponsorship isn’t really going to make a meaningful impact on a project.
• But… making the case that a for-profit company should hand over money for something