Paying for Open Source Contributions

A side effect of building a company culture around OSS is that the kind of people who gravitate to work at Formidable are passionate about their open source work, and won’t stop contributing when they clock out at 5 pm. We need to acknowledge that most of the meaningful progress in open source communities happens outside of office hours, and if we truly value the open source ecosystem and believe that the work we do has a positive impact, we need to recognize and reward people for this work. We call this program Sauce, and here’s how it works:

We pay our employees $20/hr for contributions to OSS and tech communities, whether it’s a third-party library we use in our work like React, Next.js, or styled-components; one of our own OSS projects like Spectacle or Urql; or even a personal hack project purely for fun and learning, as long as it’s released under an OSI license.

Source: formidable.com