Krithika Muthukumar on the Stripe blog:
This January, we invited three developers to come work on open-source projects full-time at Stripe. We specifically chose projects for this Open-Source Retreat that we felt would have deep impact in a variety of different areas.
Stripe has done this for several years. I’m very jealous of it. If our company was thriving it is something I’d love for Plain to be able to facilitate.
It forces me reconsider whether or not we need to be thriving in order to have a yearly impact on this. Perhaps we may not be able to pay multiple developers thousands-of-dollars and their travel expenses, etc. But, perhaps we can make our own contributions to the source code and smaller donations. Or, provide a free Barley web site.
One thing we’ve always done is double donations. We make a donation to any open source plugins or frameworks that we use in a client project and ask our clients to make one as well. I wish I kept track of the monies we’ve paid out. It isn’t very high, but it is something.