We created Target's Open Source Fund as a commitment to support open source projects we use. In short, Target now directly donates to projects through an internal process that prioritizes representation of Target’s technology team.
Target's technology team leverages open source software to deliver efficient software solutions and innovative guest experiences. The Linux Foundation estimates that 90% of code in production is of open source origin. Our role within the broader ecosystem extends beyond consumption, however. We recognize that it's our responsibility to engage across a broad spectrum of activities. This includes contributing our own software, joining communities, and patching software used by others.
We've implemented an equitable nomination and voting system internally that upholds our values, our technical rigor, and our transparency. The Fund nomination and voting events are part of a larger effort to promote open source participation within the Target technology team. We thank Indeed for publishing the program framework for its FOSS Contributor Fund and allowing other organizations to use it.
It's no secret that an engaged open source team yields transformative, innovative, and collaborative outcomes. As we looked to discover more ways to engage our team in open source, the success of Sentry's and Microsoft's open source fund efforts inspired us to pursue a similar program. Our efforts today, along with sustained and empowered upstream engagement, aim to strengthen the open source movement, reduce maintainer burnout, and normalize corporate contributions back into the ecosystem. We learned a lot from our first round and look forward to iterating with our community on future rounds.
We’ve chosen Open Collective to facilitate our donations, and for now consider projects for donations only when they use Open Collective as well. See Target tech’s public Open Collective profile for our recent donations or to track future donations.
Projects
Here are the first five projects we selected, along with a quick description of each, as described on their GitHub repository pages:
"OpenAPI Generator allows the generation of API client libraries (SDK generation), server stubs, documentation and configuration automatically given an OpenAPI Spec (v2, v3).” (Source.)
"The Software Development Kit Manager is a reliable companion for effortlessly managing multiple Software Development Kits on Unix systems.” (Source.)
“http4k is the functional toolkit for Kotlin HTTP applications. http4k provides a simple and uniform way to serve, consume, and test HTTP services.” (Source.)