We want to support open source contributors

Over the last few years, everyone at MavenHive has used Ruby and Rails extensively to deliver high quality software to our customers. Before that it was Java, and now it includes a whole bunch of JS frameworks. We are seriously looking at Go and Clojure in the near future.

Perhaps, the only criteria that we look for when we want to explore new technologies is “How strong is the open source community in that ecosystem?” Without the open source ecosystem, small shops like us cannot even imagine to operate and do what we love doing — solve complex problems with the right technology.

Having maintained a bunch of different open source libraries and frameworks ourselves we know how difficult it gets to keep going, especially when you have a day job that is putting bread on the table.

Keeping this in mind, we realised that if we plan our finances properly, we can actually do a decent contribution to an open source project and help it succeed. This is what we have in mind currently:

What kind of help are you offering?

Financial help. Right now we do not have bandwidth to support with actual coding/tasks.

What can you support?

It could be anything from getting some VM to do cross platform testing, to website hosting charges, marketing / tech writing outsourcing or even a stipend to support yourself if you are a student. We are flexible and are open to exploring any way possible to support 1 project.

Will I be selling my soul?

Of course not! This will be No Strings Attached i.e. we don’t want any control over your project and we do not want to influence the project roadmap in anyway. This is our way of giving back to the OSS community.

How do I qualify?

You should have a project that has done at least 3 releases (public) and there should be at least 20 issues that are logged by real users. At least 10 of these must be fixed already.

Do you care about what language / framework my project is in?

As of now we are mostly thinking about Ruby, Python, Clojure or Go projects. We are open to JS projects but in our experience most JS projects are quite trivial and they don’t require a lot of effort. Unless you are developing JQuery or Node or something. In which case do ping us.

If you do have another project, definitely reach out to us and we will get back to you.

I am already funded. Well, sort of. Can I still reach out?

We believe that there are a lot of projects which don’t have access to any money. We are sure you would want those projects to get a shot at this before yourself. So, for now, we will not be supporting a project that already has some financial backing.

Who decides what gets selected?

Naturally, the decision on the selection is up to us. We are still contemplating how much of the selection process we want to talk about. We are deliberating whether we will talk about all the applicants and then those who are selected; or if we will directly mention those whom we will be supporting; or if we want to work out the whole process silently.

Are there any license restrictions?

Not really. We are fine with whatever license you use for your project.

I am not sure if I qualify. What do I do?

When in doubt, reach out. (Hey, that rhymed!).

I think this is lame. Booo.

If you think there is something wrong with what we are doing or the way we are doing it, we would love to get your feedback. Drop a note to us at oss@mavenhive.in and we will get back to you.

Originally published at www.mavenhive.in on January 9, 2015.