The GitHub Secure Open Source Fund will award financing to select applicants in a program designed to fuel security and sustainability for open-source projects. Applications are open now and close on January 7. During that time, 125 projects will be selected for a piece of the $1.25 million investment fund, made possible through the participation of American Express, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Chainguard, HeroDevs, Kraken, Mayfield Fund, Microsoft, Shopify, Stripe and others. In addition to monetary support, recipients will be invited to take part in a three-week educational program.

“The open-source funding problem is very real, but a slew of initiatives have emerged of late, with startups, corporations, and venture capitalists launching various programs to support some of the most critical projects via equity-free financing,” writes TechCrunch, explaining that “open-source software isn’t always well-maintained, regardless of how pervasive it is in the global software stack.”

Problems like the Log4Shell flaw “wreaked havoc on the software supply chain, spurring programs such as the Big Tech-driven $30 million pledge to bolster open-source security in 2022,” and now GitHub’s initiative, which at 125 participants breaks down to $10,000 per award.

It amplifies “previous GitHub initiatives designed to support project maintainers that work on key components of critical software, including GitHub Sponsors, which landed in 2019 (and which is powering the new fund), but more directly the GitHub Accelerator program that launched its first cohort last year,” reports TechCrunch.

In addition to the $10,000 in funding, selected projects — each consisting of a maximum of three participants — will receive a three-week certification program that will include weekly instruction, one-to-one mentoring support, workshops and access to tools including GitHub Copilot and Autofix, according to Silicon Republic.

This past summer, GitHub partnered with the Linux Foundation and researchers from Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH) to investigate the state of open-source funding. The resulting report found that “responding organizations annually invest $1.7 billion in open source, which can be extrapolated to estimate that approximately $7.7 billion is invested across the entire open-source ecosystem annually.”

“For better or worse, GitHub has emerged as the de facto platform for open-source software development, and is the chief reason why Microsoft doled out more than $7 billion for the platform back in 2018,” TechCrunch says, noting there are several big open-source projects on which the industry relies.