Donating $5,000 to the Django Software Foundation.

This month Foxley Talent has donated $5,000 to the Django Software Foundation.

This is our ongoing commitment to the Open Source Foundation that supports the development of Django itself.

Without Django we wouldn't have our business, so each year we give a percentage of our profits to help fund the DSF and allow them to continue their great work.

The DSF is a non-profit organisation with the purpose of promoting, supporting and advancing the Django Project for it's users globally.

The foundation's goals are to:

✅ Support development of Django by sponsoring sprints, meetups, gatherings and community events.

✅ Promote the use of Django among the World Wide Web development community.

✅ Protect the intellectual property and the framework's long-term viability.

✅ Advance the state of the art in Web development.

Did you know that the DSF operates on an annual budget of $200,000 which is the equivalent annual salary of one Senior Django Developer working in the United States.

Co-Creator of Django, Jacob Kaplan-Moss gave a great talk about how much more the DSF could do with 2x, 3x and even 5x the annual budget. (check it out here)

Increasing the budget/target will take a lot of work to reach those increased levels. There is talk of the DSF employing an Executive Director who would take on this responsibility but that in itself will mean that the annual fundraising budget will need to increase.

Currently there are only 45 companies globally that sponsor the DSF.

Foxley are one of those 45 sponsors and are so proud to be able to display the Silver Member badge on everything we do. It is across our website, our YouTube videos all have the logo displayed and you will see the badge on most of our social media posts and even on our conference stand!

ROI or not, we believe that donating to the DSF is the right thing to do for our business and even though the last year has been tough for our business. In fact our toughest yet.

(Read my review of 2024)TL;DR we just about broke even after paying our salaries!

We maintain that we should give back to the DSF. Until now we said we would donate 5% of our profits, this year our donation worked out as a lot higher percentage than that.

If your employer uses Django in your development stack, employs Django Developers or benefits in some way from the Django ecosystem. I know that the Django Software Foundation would be thoroughly grateful for any additional donations that you can encourage them to make.

Likewise, if you have used Django for the benefit of your own career - any donation you are able to make personally would go a long way to securing the future of Django.

I know that not everyone is in the position to donate financially and there are plenty of other ways in which you can help. Please check out the django project website, the django discord channel or even on github and you'll be able to find ways in which you can contribute.

I like to stay in the loop with movements around funding open source software, and whilst researching this article I found the Open Source Pledge. The Open Source Pledge was actually started by Sentry, another one of the DSF Corporate Members.

Reviewing the criteria for the pledge it works out that our donation to the DSF is equivalent to $2,500 per member of our team. Developer or not and next year who knows, our donation could (and fingers crossed) work out as more.

In their own words, What is the Open Source Pledge?

"Open Source Pledge is a group of companies with a shared commitment to paying the maintainers of the Open Source software we all consume. Our goal is to establish a new social norm in the tech industry of companies paying Open Source maintainers"

I couldn't put it better than their tagline: Do the right thing, support Open Source

Thanks for reading.

If you want to speak to me about anything raised in this post please drop me an email; jon@foxleytalent.com

What I didn't really go into in this article is what Foxley Talent does as a business (I assumed if you are here reading this then you already know us) but we are a specialist recruitment company that can help your business to hire the best Python and Django Developers available.

Find out more by visiting our hiring pages or getting in touch via the email above. But I'll leave this recommendation here and maybe prompt a conversation...