Non-Profit Open Source Initiative (www.nosi.net)
They are an organization designed to bring non-profits and open source projects together. Part of what this organization does is to work on raising funds for new and existing OS projects. Judging from what I could read on their website, it does not look like they manage grants directly, but are instead acting as liaisons between OP software developers and non-profits who would benefit from OS projects.
One of the events they are attending is the regional NTEN-Non-Profit Technology Conferences.
Best I could tell, they are more of an advocacy group than an organization which will directly sponsor OS projects.
LinuxFund.org
LinuxFund.org is dedicated to giving grants and scholarships to OS software developers. They say that they give "Development Grants" to independent researchers which are intended to pay for expenses such as travel or hardware requirements.
It looks like LinuxFund.org requires legal non-profit status of an organization in order to give grants. While I understand the logic in having such a policy, only a very small percentage of the independent OS projects out there are being built under the umbrella of a non-profit.
Ladislav Bodnar's Distrowatch Donation Project
Once a month, Ladislav will donate a percentage of Distrowatch's revenue to an OS project which he finds worthy. Some of the projects he has given to are GnuCash, FluxBox, and Vim. This fund is the result of one website whose owner is willing to put his earnings where his advocacy is. I applaud his effort and I hope other popular Linux websites will follow his lead. However, the odds of an OS project receiving a donation from such a limited and high profile fund is low.
The sad truth is that little exists in the form of organizational fundraising which are tailored to independent OS software developers. I would suggest that any leads of a small, independent OS software project look for other means than institutions for funding. There just isn't the infrastructure out there for the home or back office code hacker to rely on. Yet, do not lose faith; there are other alternatives which we'll start to examine soon
Fundrasing Ideas