Following an extended review process in which we identified a number of inactive or otherwise unresponsive projects, we have today donated ~$27k of stranded project funds to support critical open source projects. Read on if you'd like to know why and how we did this...

Open Source Collective is arguably one of the world's largest open source foundations. We support over 2,600 member projects, moving over $20 million annually in support of thousands of open source maintainers and communities. We are somewhat unique among our peers in scale and the nature of our relationships with our projects. As a result, and to minimise risk, we regularly review our projects to ensure they still meet our hosting criteria and are actively engaged in maintaining their projects.

Why are we doing this?

Last autumn, we identified over 400 inactive projects and, after a prolonged, concerted effort to reactivate them, we were left with around 160 projects holding roughly $27,000 in funds. Our first priority was to reconnect with maintainers about the status of their projects and how they planned to use their funds. When it became clear the projects were no longer reachable, we explored thoughtful ways to redirect the remaining funds in line with our mission: to create and sustain a healthy open source ecosystem. After serving notice under the terms of our fiscal hosting agreement we decided the best way to use the funds was to support the infrastructure on which these projects depend, benefitting the projects and the wider ecosystem.

How are we doing this?

Thankfully, we developed something last year specifically for this purpose: Ecosystem Funds (ecosyste.ms).

Ecosystem Funds is designed to help answer the question: which open source projects do we depend on the most, and how do we support them? It offers a structured way to direct funds toward the infrastructure your projects rely on.

Ecosystem Funds has packaged millions of the most critical open source components into a few hundred Funds focused on a specific language, framework, or component. To redistribute our hosted project's abandoned funds, we matched each stranded project with an appropriate fund, and Ecosystem Funds did the rest. We contributed to the following ecosystem-wide funds:

- $15,906 to JavaScript
- $4,094 to Rust
- $1,583 to Python
- $1,576 to Java
- $1,301 to PHP
- $1,251 to Go

and a few smaller donations to framework-specific funds, such as Vue.js, jQuery, React, Svelte, Vim, and Kubernetes.

What's next?

Ecosystem Funds aims to distribute 100% of sponsorships received each month to the most critical components in each fund by directing donations to the platforms, services, or foundations each project community has chosen to manage its finances. Any project without a chosen platform is invited to add a funding.yml to their repository so we, and others interested in supporting the project, can do so. The entire process is transparent and traceable on ecosyste.ms and Open Source Collective.

You can do this too!

We are still acutely aware of the disparity between support for visible 'direct' dependencies over more fundamental 'deep' dependencies that form the backbone of critical open source infrastructure projects we rely on. That's why we have invested in platforms like ecosyste.ms and developed tools like Ecosystem Funds. We've redirected these funds to benefit the wider open source community, and encourage those who benefit from this foundation of technology to do the same.

Thanks