Thanks for the reply, interesting questions!
- Acknowledging your dependency on FOSS is the first step to contributing back to the community. A lot of organisations in India don’t even acknowledge the fact that they use FOSS, so it is trivial to ask them to donate. The motivation is to make them aware of their dependency. A similar idea of the previous FOSS pledge was to have orgs add a “Made with FOSS” footer on the website for similar reasons. It does not directly help the projects however I feel there is some value in companies choosing to acknowledge and thank the projects they rely on?
what kind of foss projects do we want to help with the financial contributions?
We can leave this on the organisation to decide IMO. These may or may not be projects they rely on or use. For eg. Co sponsoring a FOSS United project grant is also a fair contribution IMO.
there are also foss projects with commercial offerings (say, https://netdata.cloud, sentry.io, redis.io). does paying for their offerings qualify?
No, we are looking at contributions (or more specifically, donations) to projects. Buying a support license, enterprise edition or any other paid offering where you get something in return is not a valid contribution IMO.
Similarly, sponsoring a FOSS United project grant is valid, but sponsoring a FOSS United event is not since there are incentives associated with that.