Open Source Collective is consistently paying maintainers $1m a month
Published on July 8, 2024 by Benjamin Nickolls
Join us in celebrating a major milestone in Open Source Collective's history as we consistently pay open source maintainers over $1m a month.
Since 2017, Open Source Collective and our platform provider Open Collective Inc., have been at the center of an ongoing initiative to sustain open source software for the future. We started small, with a handful of projects hosted through our fiscal sponsorship program, growing to ~3,000 hosted projects in 2021. That year we accepted $12m on behalf of our member projects, but we had a problem; only 40% of those funds were being used.
In January 2022, we made 'enabling projects to use their money as well as raise it' one of the key focus areas of our strategy for 2022-2025. Today, we're celebrating as we have doubled payments in the past year, paying a record-breaking $1m to open source maintainers in April, May, and June 2024. This is even more impressive in an economic environment that has resulted in a 20% reduction in contributions to our projects in 2023.
But we're not taking all the credit.
We have pushed some of our commitments to help our projects use their money, but much of this progress has to be credited to you, open source communities. We see projects like ESLint and WebDriverIO building policies that pay new contributors and consistent maintainers, projects like ASyncAPI, Mautic, MapLibre, and PHP Foundation employ maintainers (through us) to work on projects alongside their communities. We've always believed in solving problems together, working with maintainers to solve problems from within the open source community, and we're very happy to see our philosophy turning into real outcomes.
Money in open source continues to be a polarizing subject, but we believe we're on our way to normalizing the use of money as an incentive to contribute to open source, particularly where other incentives are not as strong (read, 'maintenance'). We'll continue to push initiatives that help projects use their money to advance their work, as well as the work of others.
More on that in the coming weeks...
Since 2017, Open Source Collective and our platform provider Open Collective Inc., have been at the center of an ongoing initiative to sustain open source software for the future. We started small, with a handful of projects hosted through our fiscal sponsorship program, growing to ~3,000 hosted projects in 2021. That year we accepted $12m on behalf of our member projects, but we had a problem; only 40% of those funds were being used.
In January 2022, we made 'enabling projects to use their money as well as raise it' one of the key focus areas of our strategy for 2022-2025. Today, we're celebrating as we have doubled payments in the past year, paying a record-breaking $1m to open source maintainers in April, May, and June 2024. This is even more impressive in an economic environment that has resulted in a 20% reduction in contributions to our projects in 2023.
But we're not taking all the credit.
We have pushed some of our commitments to help our projects use their money, but much of this progress has to be credited to you, open source communities. We see projects like ESLint and WebDriverIO building policies that pay new contributors and consistent maintainers, projects like ASyncAPI, Mautic, MapLibre, and PHP Foundation employ maintainers (through us) to work on projects alongside their communities. We've always believed in solving problems together, working with maintainers to solve problems from within the open source community, and we're very happy to see our philosophy turning into real outcomes.
Money in open source continues to be a polarizing subject, but we believe we're on our way to normalizing the use of money as an incentive to contribute to open source, particularly where other incentives are not as strong (read, 'maintenance'). We'll continue to push initiatives that help projects use their money to advance their work, as well as the work of others.
More on that in the coming weeks...
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Halayma Khatun
Posted on July 22, 2024