It’s a pretty unfortunate state of affairs. Google/Microsoft/Amazon should be throwing money at these projects. It’s in their best interest if they use it.
A policy in tech companies to grant a given amount (let say 50$) per month to each employee, the employee can attribute this amount to whichever OSS project(s) he sees fit.
If the employee doesn't chose a project, this amount is given to OSS projects in need.
To streamline this, the ideal would be to have a service where everything could be done:
* OSS projects register to it
* Tech Companies then give the money to the service, which then dispatch it to the OSS projects
* Employees of tech companies logs into the service to select which projects they chose to give money to (with maybe some suggestion to avoid over/under funding projects).
> to grant a given amount (let say 50$) per month to each employee
Let's make that amount dependent on the employee's salary. Not 50$ per employee per month, but e.g. salary for 1 hour per employee per month. Salaries vary a lot between countries (and even within countries).
This is happening all over the industry, pretty much all companies just make use of open source software without giving a penny to the thousands of projects they leverage on a daily basis to make profit or even keep the lights on.
As someone who runs a small open source project that clearly states that Patreon donations are accepted and even offers some convenience benefits to donors, I often see people jumping extra hoops to avoid it, including clearly profitable companies that saved many thousands by using my software, spending extra time that would amount to more than those donations. So far I get donations from less than one percent of my estimated users.
Facebook, microsoft, github, etc all pay $$ and our time into a pool that is used to incentivize the finding, vetting and fixing of security flaws in major software running the internet.
