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GitHub Stars Don’t Pay the Bills. Canonical Will.
Canonical is donating $120K to the developers behind the tools we all use — even if we don’t know their names.
You probably didn’t notice the open source code that helped load this page. That’s okay. You weren’t supposed to.
Open source lives in the background — quiet, invisible, and everywhere. It powers your favorite apps, keeps websites running, and makes the internet work.
The people behind it? Often just volunteers, writing code late at night, fixing bugs on weekends, answering questions from strangers. Not for money. Not for fame.
They don’t show up in splashy launch events. They’re not on anyone’s payroll. But their work touches everything.
And now, finally, someone’s giving back.
Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, knows this better than most. And now they’re doing something about it.
In May 2025, Canonical began donating $10,000 per month to small open source projects — the libraries and tools that keep its systems (and yours) running.
Over the next 12 months, that’s $120,000 going directly to maintainers. No strings. No meetings. Just support.