Canonical has announced it will donate US$120,000 to open-source developers over the next year. The company plans to contribute $10,000 per month for 12 months, starting with the first payment sent out in April. These funds will be distributed through the thanks.dev platform.
This initiative is aimed at providing financial support to the smaller upstream open source projects that Canonical depends on. It serves as an additional way to give back, alongside Canonical's ongoing support for major open source foundations like the Eclipse Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and the GNOME Foundation.
Thanks.dev works by analyzing a company's GitHub repositories and dependency trees, up to three levels deep, and splitting the donation algorithmically based on which dependencies are used the most. Canonical mentioned that it can adjust how the funds are weighted at the programming language level to better represent their usage.
Canonical uses projects made by developers like nedbat, who wrote coverage.py, and adamchainz, who maintains time-machine, a library used on the Ubuntu website. The company says even small bits of recognition or financial support can matter to open source developers. It's a way of showing appreciation for the work these projects do behind the scenes. Most of Canonical's code is open source and developed out in the open on platforms like GitHub and Launchpad. It also notes that thanks.dev is working on adding support for checking dependencies hosted on Launchpad.
This announcement follows the recent release of Ubuntu 25.04 "Plucky Puffin," an interim version incorporating many new open source components benefiting from active upstream development, such as the GNOME 4.8 desktop and Linux kernel 6.14.
While supporting projects for future development is key, ensuring the stability of existing Ubuntu installations remains important. We recently published a guide on how to enable Extended Security Maintenance on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS before its standard security support ends on May 29, 2025. Enabling ESM via Ubuntu Pro helps users continue to receive critical security patches after that date.
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