DuckDuckGo has for the third year in a row generously donated $25,000 to the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund as part of its annual charitable donations program. OSTIF works full time on funding open source security projects and engagements and collaborating directly with security teams and project maintainers from around the world on high-priority projects of all sizes and dynamics. The majority of our administrative funding is sourced directly from our cut of audit funding. DuckDuckGo’s direct donation is an incredible resource of no-strings-attached financial support, which is used to cover overhead and administrative costs for the OSTIF organization and employees.
Funding administration overhead as a small nonprofit is incredibly tricky, and as work ebbs and flows, so does company income. This makes it difficult to budget, not to mention adds stress professionally and personally to our team. As our work is for the benefit of the global digital community as a non-profit organization, we do not distribute any company income as organizational or personal wealth. That means we must find sources of financing or donations to support our administrative and organizational costs. Large donations make it possible for OSTIF to budget for year over year instead of by quarters, to make concrete commitments to projects, security firms, and funders earlier, and to afford budget lines like marketing and public relations, travel per diems, and cost-of-living raises. With the generous support of DuckDuckGo since 2021, we have fully funded healthcare for the duration of the year for all employees.
Security and privacy companies like DuckDuckGo work with us daily to bring security work from paper to reality. Engagements like the ones we perform require heavy research, around the clock work ethic, specialized knowledge and education, and a wide range of contacts across the field of technology. The labor OSTIF employees perform turns money into actualized security impact and funding into positive security influence for projects critical to our world’s digital infrastructure. Recurring carte-blanche funding enables our organization to focus on our mission and business objectives instead of financing administrative overhead costs.
We would like to thank DuckDuckGo profusely for their continued support of OSTIF. To receive donations like this inspires our team with the reminder that there are businesses who believe in our work and our mission with no caveats.
If you or your enterprise are interested in supporting open source security work at such a pivotal time in our industry, but do not currently have the financial resources to support funding a security audit, consider instead supporting OSTIF’s work directly with a donation. Please reach out to [email protected] with any questions or to follow up on our call to action.