At Doberman, we rely on open source software. We depend on a working open source community. Every day we're crafting new products with the help of someone else's work. To be able to do the things we do, the very things we're proud of, we need the work of others, whether it's a programming language, a compiler, a web framework or a small utility library that's only there to do one thing.
We believe in supporting the system we rely on. It’s part egoistic, we will still need this system in the future, and part idealistic, we believe in a free and open source approach over a proprietary, non-transparent way of building the future.
Until now, we’ve been struggling to find a good way of contributing. We've open sourced some of the work we’ve done, such as our attempt at a more gender equal working world, GenderEQ. We’ve tried to actively contribute to open source projects, both with code and by reporting the issues we come across. But in no way have our contributions come close to meeting how much we use what others have built.
Now we're launching our next attempt.
We're starting Doberman FOSS (Free and open-source software) Fund, a fund aiming at contributing with direct sponsorships to the projects that are the most important to us. This year we will contribute with $5,000 (USD) to these projects.
But what we’re even more excited about is the way we’re doing it. And that's by doing what we’re best at. By building a product that helps anyone who also wants to be part of this. That's why we're launching Ancillary.
Ancillary is a product that analyzes your organization’s GitHub repositories and uses an algorithm to automate the process of finding what is most important to you. It also helps you to analyze your usage over time as well as creating sponsorships.
We hope that you will join us in our mission by joining Ancillary. We will need to test drive it for a couple of months, but starting today we'll start taking signups to let you in as soon as we can.
Visit ancillary.doberman.co