From Phillip Greenspun's Weblog: What should a new charitable foundation with $100 million do?

Sitting around with a couple of friends at breakfast in Santa Clara, the question of how to spend $100 million on charity came up. As these folks had been working at Google for a few years this was not mere idle speculation.

My personal suggestion #3 is to fund open-source software. A tremendous amount of benefit has been delivered to people around the world by free and open-source software. Aside from Web applications it is in fact tough to think of things that can be built by just a handful of people that touch the lives of millions. Yet traditional foundations don't think software is interesting and the U.S. Government spends its time and effort suing Microsoft instead of paying programmers to improve the GNU tools and Linux.

I would like to see some sort of general fund for OSS where OSS projects small and large could gain funding. It would be like a OSS agency that handed out grants for OSS work. People/corporations could donate money to this agency, possibly even earmarking for a certain project or type of project, and write it off their taxes. $100 million sounds like plenty to get such an agency running w/ some seed money for some initial grants until donations started coming in.