I love open source, I use open source products every day, I also publish lots of open source code, and I donate to open source projects sometimes. Actually I want to donate to open source projects more often, because as an open source developer I know the difficulties these open source maintainers face, without enough direct financial pay back from their excellent projects, they are often unable to make fast or even regular improvements, so that many good projects are abandoned.

I’m one of those few lucky open source developers who have made millions from building open source projects. Lucky and busy, that’s why I only donate to open source projects seldomly. But I always know nothing could be used as an excuse to not contribute back, and I also believe any tiny contributions are better than none, so I’m going to make a rolling indie grant project.

The grant rule is simple, regularly donate to those active indie projects whose financial condition are bad. Precisely executed as:

1. Build a rolling grant pool of maximum $1M in crypto.
2. Select active indie projects which the pool owners used regularly.
3. Grant $10K to each project, with 6 months rolling payment.
4. Grant may be stopped due to inactive development.
5. After grant finishes, decide further grant based on pool size and project status.

This grant pool starts from my own fund, and accept contributions from who love open source. Here open source is not restricted to traditional open source code, I think writings, drawings, musics, movies, and services that value privacy are all some kind of open source, they don’t even need to be free or open their code or copyright. It makes us able to keep track of the project status without extra efforts by limiting the projects to those the pool owners used regularly.

The grant won’t get any shares from the project, but the project is required to be not in good financial situation. That’s because the grant pool is not large, and meant for those projects which most need it.

Roll the grant!