How should companies contribute to open-source?

For many of us in the tech industry, open source software has been instrumental in our careers. It's only natural that we ask ourselves, how can we give back?

On an individual level, it's quite straightforward - we can contribute code to open source libraries or create our own. But when it comes to companies, the matter is more complex.

One way that companies can give back is by building their business around an open-source project. Vercel, for example, has done this with Next.js.

But what if your company's core product isn't open-source, like Reflect?

Our strategy started out with making small donations to some critical open-source libraries we use: YJS and Remirror. We then hired one of Remirror's core contributors, Ocavue, to work on our customizations and split his time between our work and Remirror.

Then we made targeted donations to projects that we believe will be integral to the next generation of web applications, like web-ai web-transformers, and cr-sqlite.

Recently, we made a significant donation to wa-sqlite to change its license from a copyleft one to an MIT one. wa-sqlite is an impressive cross-platform client-side sqlite library, and we believe that making its license more permissive will benefit the community.

We're just getting started, but we're committed to giving back to open source. We’d love to hear from all of you - what are ways you suggest contributing?