I am regularly in a position to control how funds for tech projects are spent. For example, choosing cloud infrastructure and such. I want to direct as much funding as possible to FOSS or FOSS friendly projects. The amount of money that I have control over in the company is way more than I could ever donate.
For example, I want to fund Linux kernel development, Postgres, language maintainers, etc.
I can’t convince companies to donate outright, but I could get them to buy a license or choose a different cloud provider or database provider.
I’m looking for ways to get money to people making a difference through legitimate channels that I can use to push internally.
EDIT:
Summary of my favorite options so far,
If you’re willing to use OpenBSD, there’s OpenBSD.amsterdam as far as cloud providers go :^)
In all seriousness, they donate about 15-20% of what they charge you to the OpenBSD Foundation. I also like their service. Though again, they are OpenBSD-exclusive, so I can’t say I recommend the service for your use case (which seems Linux-focused) unless you really want to switch to OpenBSD.
SQLite also has licenses you can pay for as well as support contracts you can get, though not a cloud provider.
Unfortunately, I don’t really know of anything similar in the Linux world or in regards to other databases and cloud providers nowadays. I know DigitalOcean in particular decided to abandon all of their FOSS donations except towards Omarchy for some reason.