FOSS Backstage 2024: Who Funds FOSS Foundations?

Welcome - this is a page of notes and references for my FOSS Backstage talk in Berlin about “Who Funds FOSS Foundations?” Most links here are to open source sites that appreciate your contributions, just like this site does!

Questions? I’m @ShaneCurcuru on social media.

Session Topics

I’ll be covering three topics in my talk, and while I know it will be informative, I hope to leave attendees with a number of much more focused questions for them to think about around sustainability.

Aspects of Sustainability

Watching people talking about sustainability, I’m struck by how conversations felt very siloed depending on the experience and role of participants. I wonder: is there some way we can quantify or categorize the different roles of people in the software ecosystem, so that when we talk about sustainability, we can translate larger frameworks into the context of that person’s role?

I’ve proposed set of roles or groups - like contributors, maintainers, or software companies - is provided. Being able to map the concerns from each group in their own terms into some larger taxonomy of sustainability terms can help both with research efforts, and with education. I call these Aspects Of Sustainability.

I’m really hoping to get feedback across the ecosystem of how to make this valuable. Sustainability means at least the social, financial, organizational, and security/ecosystem ability to maintain the people and software that makes the world work. Note: not yet covered here is environmental sustainability.

Modeling Foundation Sponsorship Programs

Most hosting foundations have sponsorship models, where corporations can donate a certain amount, and get some benefits. The benefits and amounts different foundations ‘charge’ vary widely. I’ve built a model of sponsorship programs, and mapped actual sponsorship prospectuses to the model for a number of popular foundations.

How can we improve this model? What other factors in the ways that foundations create sponsorship programs are important for their health?

Comparative Financials of US Nonprofit Foundations

US nonprofits all file 990 tax forms, meaning we have consistent, if high-level, income and expense data for them all. Let’s go on a journey of a handful of the major FOSS Foundations that host multiple projects, and see both what they do for projects, and how much the make and spend.

Note that US 990 tax filings take a long time to show up publicly, so data is always a year or so back. Also, I’m still looking for effective ways to evaluate EU charities’ finances; help wanted!

Current raw data as CSV and partial source 990 data as json via ProPublica.

See also: Kara Sowles’s excellent FOSDEM State of Funding Free & Open Source Software.

See the FOSS Backstage Sustainability Track

• Adventures with Open Source Business Models, Tarus Balog
• Aligning wishes of multiple orgs into an open source project, Thomas Steenbergen & Nick Vidal
• Bridging Both Sides: A FOSS Funding LARP, Carolyn Beer, Eric Bear, & ngọc triệu
• Success through a thousand emails: Fundraising and outreach, Dawn Wages
• The Cuckoo in Bidding: When the Manufacturer Loses to Itself, Peer Heinlein & Daniel Zielke
• Why is there no new Release? Nobody pays for the basics :-(, Schlomo Schapiro & Gratien Dhaese
• Who Funds FOSS Foundations?, Shane Curcuru

Thanks and Credits

This presentation is based on my Who Pays For FOSS Foundations? slide deck, but is completely reworked with new data and concepts for the FOSS Backstage crowd.

For more resources, see the FOSS Sustainability Zotero library.

Thanks to all the open source communities that have helped out along the way, and thanks in advance to everyone who is helping out with sustainability!