[BangPypers] Funding FOSS through CSR

[Harsh Gupta]

Hi,

After watching a talk from PyCon Australia, which I came about through the
blog
by Krace, I was thinking about the problem of funding free and open source
software. I highly encourage you to watch it too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY8B2lXIu6g

By a recent mandate of Government of India, all the companies which have an
annual profit of more than 5 crores have at spend least 2% of the profit of
last three years as Cooperate Social Responsibility (CSR). This mandate came
into power from April 2014 and there is quite a buzz about it. 2% of 3 years
profit is huge amount and this is a great opportunity for us to direct this
money to fund Free and Open Source Software. We ask Software Firms in India
to
give their CSR money to Python Software Foundation of India (PSSI) or maybe
to
FSF India. And these organizations can use this money to set up fellowships
and
grants to hire software developers to work full time on important, I would
prefer existing, FOSS projects. I think it will also be easier to give a
business logic to fund FOSS, because FOSS often builds up the basic
infrastructure on which all these new tech startups/IT firms base their work
upon and better FOSS will make things easier for everyone.

So, what do you think about it? People who have been involved with
organizations like PSSI and FSF India can you tell us more about their
workings, funding and basically what do they do and how do they operate.
Also
do you think it will be feasible to get other software foundation from the
US,
like FSF, PSF or NumFocus to get directly involved in this kind of funding?

-- 
Harsh
Sent from a GNU/Linux