Beginning 2010, we have made annual donations to charities on behalf of moderators through the Stack Gives Back program. At the same time, in recognition of the many ways that we benefit from open source projects, we began to make annual donations to a number of the different open source tools that were used in building Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network. These annual donations continued every year through 2017.
We are happy to announce that we have now restarted our Open Source donations, and have just finished donating $10,000 to a number of open source projects:
ProseMirror ($2,000) - The foundation of the Stacks Editor.
Floating UI ($1,000) - Stacks popover element is 100% powered by Floating UI.
MailKit ($1,000) - Our SMTP Client for the Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise tier.
Markdig ($1,000) - A CommonMark Markdown processor used to convert Markdown to HTML on the server.
markdown-it ($1,000) - Powers all client-side CommonMark parsing (previews for both the old and new editors).
webpack ($1,000) - Bundle tool used in a number of our applications.
MathJax ($750) - Powers all client-side mathematical formula rendering.
Moq ($750) - A .NET mocking framework that we use to simplify unit testing.
Shouldly ($500) - Provides an assertion framework that we use in unit and integration testing.
eleventy ($500) - Used to build the Stacks documentation (among other things).
Creative Commons ($500) - License provider for all of our network content.
In order to arrive at this list, we surveyed representatives of all Engineering teams in the company for nominations from which we determined a final list of recipients. Amounts were determined based on a few factors, including: the importance of the component in our tech ecosystem, the number of places in which we use it, and whether or not we have donated to this project in the past.
We appreciate very much all contributions to the open source ecosystem, and look forward to continuing to show our support for it in the future.