Foundations also can help in more indirect ways, like mentorship, recognition, and community support, and by providing metrics to help business owners quantify the impact of projects and direct investments. “Foundations take up a huge portion of project support beyond straightforward funding,” says Brian Proffitt, senior manager of community outreach in the Open Source Program Office at Red Hat. “For Red Hat, supporting the many diverse foundations in the free and open-source software ecosystem is one of the ways we can ensure that as many projects as possible can remain healthy and vibrant,” he says.
As open-source maintainer Seth Michael Larson sees it, the best method to support open source is by “paying full-time staffing at non-profit foundations to work on various swaths of the ecosystem with a broad scope.” This could help fill in the gaps around security, process, documentation, releases, and governance, he says, without taking away incentives for people to continue contributing on their own time.
However, many critical open-source projects do not wish to be housed in a foundation, says Suehle, for various reasons. We need to find ways to support them as well, she says, adding that several projects have attempted to address this issue over the years, such as SustainOSS.