Canonical, the company behind the most popular Linux distro in the world, announced plans to donate $120,000 to open source developers.

Listen to our deep dive into this $120,000 donation to devs!

Open source developers are often behind some of the most important pieces of software, including apps, services, libraries, and APIs that companies of all sizes rely on. Many of these developer toil away on their projects with little to no recognition or compensation for their work.

Canonical’s Ben Hoyt says that, while it already supports major open source organizations, the company expanded its donations to include smaller developers in April, via thanks.dev.

We’ve committed to donating US$120,000 to open source developers over the next 12 months, transferred at $10,000 per month. The distribution of funds is determined by thanks.dev’s algorithm, which splits the money based on which dependencies are used by more projects. As their website explains:

Our systems will (1) walk your repositories; (2) grab the manifest files; (3) collate your dependency tree up to 3 levels deep; and (4) trickle your donation breadth first across said tree.

Hoyt says he hopes the donations give developers some much-needed recognition for their hard work.

I personally love how we’re giving to over 350 GitHub users and orgs. Each receives a relatively small amount, but it adds up over time. While very few open source developers do it for the money, the feeling of being recognised, knowing that someone cared enough to show it, has real meaning for an open source creator.

By default, thanks.dev splits the funds automatically according to how often a dependency is used. However, one can boost or reduce the weight at the programming language level and at the GitHub org level. For now, we’ve tweaked the language knobs to try to fairly represent our usage, and we’ll no doubt make other changes over time.

Canonical often gets a bad rap in the open source community. Some users have a long memory for some missteps the company made many years ago, such as including an Amazon affiliate link in Ubuntu. Others, more recently, are unhappy with the company for its insistence on using its Snap universal app format.

Despite some unpopular decisions, the fact remains that Canonical does far more good than harm in the open source developers, and its latest effort is proof of that.