Information agency Bloomberg has recently launched the Foss Contributor Fund, which aims to provide financial support for open projects. According to the announcement, Bloomberg employees will select up to three open projects each quarter and award them grants worth $10,000. Employees from different departments and areas of the company can nominate applicants for grants, taking into account the specifics of their work. The selection of winners will be done through a vote.
The move to create the fund is a direct response to the increasing use of open source software within the Bloomberg infrastructure. By supporting in-demand open projects, the company hopes to make a tangible contribution to the development of the open software industry.
The first round of grants went to the developers of three open projects. The beneficiaries of the grants are the teams behind Apache Arrow, a data analysis platform, Curl, a utility, and CleryQ, a message processing system.
Overall, Bloomberg’s Foss Contributor Fund is a positive step forward for open software development. The additional funding will provide greater support for essential open software projects, which can have a positive impact on society as a whole.