Mysterious grant forfeited, $100,000 from Software in the Public Interest accounts 2023
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
Techrights has recently reported on a grant of $100,000 forfeited by Software in the Public Interest, Inc (SPI).
SPI acts as an umbrella for multiple free and open source software projects. Their form 990 public filings do not give a per-project breakdown.
Somebody may be able to peek through the month-by-month financial reports and identify when they received this grant, when they gave it back and which organization it relates to. Or somebody could try to ask them.
Grants often come with conditions. In some cases, an organization applies for a grant in good faith and later on, after receiving the money, they decide that spending the money, under the conditions they agreed to, is no longer profitable for the organization so they give it back.
Sometimes the conditions include specific targets or deadlines. In those cases, the organization may be doing some work but they miss the deadline. If they incurred expenses related to the project and then gave the money back then the community needs to look very closely at what went wrong.
During 2025, the new US Government administration has canceled many grants. The reports being discussed from SPI relate to the return of a grant in 2023, prior to the Trump administration.
Prior to the death of Abraham Raji, the accounts from SPI showed us over $120,000 spent on legal fees for censoring discussions about Debianism. Yet DebConf organizers asked volunteers to contribute their own money to the day trip and Abraham Raji was left alone, swimming unsupervised, and he drowned.
While waiting for more details about this money from 2023, now is a good time to go and read through the leaked debian-private archives to see some of the discussions about the secret strategy for SPI and why SPI was created separately from Debianism.
Read more about governance issues at Software in the Public Interest, Inc. █