This would ideally be a flow chart or so for finding funding. It is a work in progress. I’ll begin with a couple of interesting links and see where I get from there.
Intro might be something like: Open Source has won, and there’s plenty work to be done. Let’s roll up our sleeves :)
In my experience, good devs flock around Open Source projects, and companies which release Free Software will produce higher quality code and get and keep better developers.
The Log4Shell vulnerability found by the Alibaba Cloud Security Team in 2021 is one well-known example of the supply chain security debate: all the world runs on Open Source, while maintaining of that software is often done by volunteers in their spare time. I am hopeful incidents like this show how much value is created by FOSS and that this common infrastructure can’t be gratis.
Filippo Valsorda’s blog post Professional maintainers: a wake-up call as well as the follow-up post How to pay professional maintainers both are a good read. I think Filippo is right when he says:
Big companies desperately need the Open Source ecosystem to professionalize.
Starting out as a collection of (hopefully) useful links.
Resources
- lemonade-stand: A handy guide to financial support for open source
- AGPL: This license might fit when you create a SaaS business
Funds
- (DE) Prototype Fund funds “Public Interest Tech” and requires results to be released as FOSS.
- (DE) Sovereign Tech Fund, started by the former Prototype Fund director, issues grants for maintaining open source projects. This might be a consequence of the supply chain security debate actually?
