CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -

CarGurus chief technology officer Kyle Lomeli says open source code is “critically important” to how CarGurus builds its systems and products. In addition, he said, his company gets great benefit “from the altruism of the open source community."

CarGurus says open source projects “provide the collaborative, open development of software code” allowing companies such as CarGurus to access technical innovation beyond their own resources.

Because of that, CarGurus has launched the CarGurus Open Source Fund, an employee-led charitable initiative. Members of the CarGurus engineering team founded the fund.

The program will give back to the open source projects that the company says helps fuel the company’s technology. The Open Source Fund will empower engineers to choose open source projects that inspire their passion and that they believe deserve financial support.

"By forming the CarGurus Open Source Fund, we are able to give back to the open source projects that continue to give our team the technical tools to do our jobs at scale,” Lomeli said in a news release. “We look forward to helping the open source community thrive as our engineering team grows and more employees become eligible to allocate quarterly funds."

The company says the Open Source Fund’s contributions will help ensure the sustainability of open source projects and engineers’ access to that extra layer of code development.

CarGurus hopes the Open Source Fund will show appreciation while supporting the open source community and giving other technology companies the same opportunity to innovate and grow. Open source projects will become eligible each quarter for nomination based on their significance to either CarGurus or its employees.

Once a project is nominated, an internal committee will oversee the finalists and determine donation distribution. The quarterly allocation is based on the number of participating employees. When the team grows, the allocation will grow as well. CarGurus intends to fund donations each year under the Open Source Fund to open source projects reaching more than $100,000.

In the first round of donations, CarGurus employees selected the following organizations or projects:

— Apache Software Foundation
— Homebrew
— Babel
— Git
— Linux Kernel
— RuboCop
— Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP)
— FreeBSD
— Webpack

Because of the volume of projects that CarGurus develops using software from the Apache Software Foundation, that organization will receive a donation of more than $12,000. With that significant donation to Apache, CarGurus will become a foundation sponsor in support of the projects it provides.