I am regularly in a position to control how funds for tech projects are spent. For example, choosing cloud infrastructure and such. I want to direct as much funding as possible to FOSS or FOSS friendly projects. The amount of money that I have control over in the company is way more than I could ever donate.
For example, I want to fund Linux kernel development, Postgres, language maintainers, etc.
I can’t convince companies to donate outright, but I could get them to buy a license or choose a different cloud provider or database provider.
I’m looking for ways to get money to people making a difference through legitimate channels that I can use to push internally.
EDIT:
Summary of my favorite options so far,
I like how some projects will allow free non-commercial use, but otherwise require a commercial license or an open-source maintenance fee to use commercially, like Inno Setup, WiX Toolset, etc. It’s honor-based with no real enforcement (so no dealing with serial number, or activation systems), it’s also not an outrageous amount of money and it keeps the project afloat.
Yeah those make my life easy because I can just set up billing for them.
I wish there was a cloud provider that literally just up charged 5-10% that went straight to donations.
If you’re willing to use OpenBSD, there’s OpenBSD.amsterdam as far as cloud providers go :^)
In all seriousness, they donate about 15-20% of what they charge you to the OpenBSD Foundation. I also like their service. Though again, they are OpenBSD-exclusive, so I can’t say I recommend the service for your use case (which seems Linux-focused) unless you really want to switch to OpenBSD.
SQLite also has licenses you can pay for as well as support contracts you can get, though not a cloud provider.
Unfortunately, I don’t really know of anything similar in the Linux world or in regards to other databases and cloud providers nowadays. I know DigitalOcean in particular decided to abandon all of their FOSS donations except towards Omarchy for some reason.