Salesforce Gives Back Through FOSS Fund

In 2020, Salesforce’s Open Source Programs Office wanted to take a more significant role in giving back to the open source projects that make Salesforce products what they are today. We know that a sustainable open source ecosystem is essential for our technical future, and financially supporting these projects is one of the ways we can ensure the projects we depend on are healthy and thriving. With this in mind, we started a FOSS Fund.

What is the Salesforce FOSS Contributor Fund?

If you attended All Things Open in 2020, you may have caught our talk with Indeed about the FOSS Fund. If not, the FOSS Fund is a way for our employees to decide what projects we support. Each quarter, our employees who have contributed to open source can nominate and vote on the projects they are passionate about. The project with the most votes receives a $10,000 sponsorship. It’s that simple!

So far, we are very excited to announce that we have supported 11 projects, including Speedy Web Compiler (SWC), Transloco, Homebrew, ESLint, Rollup, Prettier, Mocha, JsForce, Grafana, Pydantic, and Mockito.

Set up a FOSS Fund at your company!

Are you interested in starting a FOSS Fund at your company? In the true spirit of open source, we leaned heavily on Indeed’s guidance (thanks, y’all!) but have put our own spin on a few things. Here are some gotchas we considered when setting up the program:

• Have a way to easily pay the projects. Whether though Open Collective, GitHub sponsors, or another method, you want to ensure it is easy and quick for the winning project to receive their finds.
• Have some parameters around the winning projects. For example, at Salesforce, they can not be owned by a Salesforce employee and must use an OSI-approved license.
• Make it clear to your employees how they can nominate and vote. The easier it is for your employees, the more participation you will get.
• We keep the nominations and the voting open for one week each.
• We considered how to select a winner in the case of a tie. We have an Open Source Core Team who volunteer their time to support and better open source at Salesforce, so we decided we would lean on them as our tie-breaking votes if that situation were to come up.
• Most importantly, listen to the feedback and adjust.

Interested in learning more about open source at Salesforce? Check out our Open Source website.

The Featured Blog Posts series will highlight posts from partners and members of the All Things Open community leading up to the conference in the fall.