Giving up to 5% of my annual salary to FOSS

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has a sustainability problem.

For those of you who are a part of the FOSS ecosystem, or are fairly familiar with it, Duh. But here's a short intro for the uninitiated - you are relying on Free and Open Source software when you read this blog post. Most commercial software applications are made up primarily of FOSS. Our digital lives are powered by FOSS. Yet, a majority of the people who create, maintain, and sustain the FOSS projects are underfunded, if not completely unfunded.

This isn't really news - for more than a decade now, people in the FOSS community have been complaining about the sustainability problem, and people have come up with varying solutions to the problem. A real solution to the FOSS sustainability problem involves systematic support from for-profit enterprises and Nation-State Governments but for the moment, let's focus on what I can do as an individual. And why am I bringing this up now? Because of what's happened over the past couple of weeks.

• I attended the OpenSSF Community Day India, Open Source Summit India, and CloudNativeCon + KubeCon India events in Hyderabad, India. The budget for the events seemed far larger than similar-sized software/tech events that I've attended in the past, and i can't stop wondering if the money could have been better spent elsewhere. I'm bringing up these events because people in my network are still actively discussing it but a lot of software/tech events feel like they spend more than they ought to
• The Python Software Foundation paused their grants program. The PSF grants program supports Python-related conferences, workshops, local Python communities. While the pause doesn't impact Python software development work (Python is Free and Open Source Software), this does impact the FOSS community around Python, reducing the chances of them coming together physically to sustain the community
• Kenneth Reitz sought donations via Venmo in a LinkedIn post. If you're from the Python ecosystem, I hope you recognize the name - Kenneth created the requests Python library, which pushed every other Python library to seriously consider user experience. He also wrote the popular Hitchhiker's Guide to Python book. See also his GitHub profile. How he ended up in such a bad financial position isn't clear to me at the moment and I have no idea how much financial support he received from the community for creating such a meaningful software project. But i'm not surprised as i've seen similar fate befall other giants in the FOSS ecosystem
• Daniel Stenberg, the creator of the widely used cURL, shared a list of car brands running cURL (47) vs those that fund it (0)

Over the weekend, I spent close to 4 hours moving and sorting through trash collected in a Himalayan village, which included plastic and glass bottles, all kinds of clothing, plastic bags and wrappers of various shapes and forms. Over the past year, I've been laser focused on systematic solutions to the sustainability problem in the FOSS ecosystem that I've forgotten that I myself can have an impact.

Which brings me to donating money. I make 30 Lakh INR per annum. I am currently the CEO of the FOSS United Foundation and my salary information is already public on the FOSS United forum. According to this Purchasing Power Parity salary calculator, 129,656 USD in Austin, Texas, USA is the equivalent to my salary in India. For context, according to the Income Comparator of the World Inequality Database, i'm in the top 10% of Indian households, assuming a 3-member household (my wife and our son). My wife and son don't really rely on me financially so changing the math to a 1-member household makes me in the top 4% of Indian households. While at my previous job, I was in the 1% bracket for income. I can say with certainty that I wouldn't be in this financial position if not for Free and Open Source Software.

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. - Steve Wozniak, Co-founder of Apple Inc.

5% of my annual salary is 1.5 Lakh INR (150,000 INR). Given how much wealth I have amassed over the past nine years on the efforts of the FOSS community, giving up to 1.5 Lakh INR per annum is the least I can do.

Here's how I am starting today

• 50 USD for TeX Users Group (85 USD for special individual membership because I live in India minus 35 USD for Electronic regular membership option) because the resume that helped me land my previous job was made using TeX/LaTeX and my Master's Thesis was written using LaTeX
• 50 USD (25 USD + additional contribution 25 USD) for PSF Supporting Member - Sliding Scale because Python made me want to write software again after horribly failing my undergrad course on programming with C
• 50 USD one-time donation to the NumFOCUS foundation, whose sponsored projects NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, were what we built customer solutions on top of at my previous job
• 100 EUR annual donation to KDE, because KStars was my first exposure to Free and Open Source Software as an astronomy geek
• 5 USD a month (60 USD per annum) via GitHub Sponsors to Kovid Goyal because Kitty is my go to terminal and Calibre is my go to e-book manager
• 5 USD a month (60 USD per annum) via GitHub Sponsors to Mastodon, because we need a decentralized social media platform
• 5,200 INR per annum to forgejo/Codeberg via Liberapay, because one of my GitHub repositories helped me land by previous job but I'm not happy with the direction GitHub is going. I'm joining the "out club" with Daniel Stenberg
• 15 GBP per annum for OpenStreetMap Foundation Normal Membership because why would you contribute to a closed ecosystem like Google Maps when you could contribute to an open ecosystem like OSM instead

This doesn't exactly count but I want to add that my family and I are on the Ente Pro plan - INR 849 per month (10,188 INR per annum) - because Ente Photos >>> Google Photos/Apple Photos/Dropbox and Ente Auth >>> Google Auth. I'm also supporting Zotero with a 20 USD per annum storage plan because upgrading individual subscriptions is one of the ways to support Zotero as an individual. Zotero is where I collect, organize, and annotate things that I've read.

I'll work towards the 1.5 Lakh INR number over the course of the rest of the Financial Year 2025-26 and I will try to keep you all posted.