Funding Open Source like public infrastructure
I agree that open source infrastructure needs to be funded. I think first there needs to be a mindset shift in who's responsible for open source.
Currently when new vulnerabilities pop up (i.e. xz-utils compromise, log4j shell), people are quick to blame the maintainers for it. Why shouldn't companies instead be responsible for these vulnerabilities?
Currently, companies treat open source code as someone else's, so they don't bother to audit, maintain it, or fund it. Clearly, this is wrong, and reflected in the oss license, which states that code is solely consumer's responsibility.
I’ve given up on hopes of having funding on open source. My open source packages account for about 1.2% of all PHP code downloaded from Packagist (package manager) but unless there is a commercial effort behind it, I do not see it happening. A couple devs in highly hyped companies is able to generate a following big enough to solicit some non trivial amount of funding but the majority just doesn’t care enough about it to fund it. In the end, is open source maintainers are stupid enough to give our code away for free, so who’s really to blame for this. Perhaps it’s an overly pessimistic view, but not a view that has historically been disproven.
I lead open source projects for the United Kingdom National Health Service, specifically for NHS Wales Digital Health and Care. The UK is investing significantly in open source and publishing widely about the importance of open source.
https://www.england.nhs.uk/digitaltechnology/open-source/
If you're technical and curious, I'm currently porting the UK NHS design system from Nunjucks to more implementations, including vanilla HTML CSS TypeScript, and my personal favorite Svelte Tailwind Daisy UI. Claude Code is churning on it right now.
https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/public-good-design-sy...
AMA. And we're hiring. Feel free to message me.
The public barely want to fund public infrastructure, for the electricity they use, the water they drink. And especially not for the electricity and water that their neighbours, or people across town, or people somewhere else in the country need.
I would be much more excited in finding ways to fund public infrastructure like Amazon does Prime rather than going the other way around. If anything, academic open source which is the closest alternative has not really produced much and the production open source that actually works is by and large corporate-sponsored.
P.S. The article also opens by contrasting open source consumption and contribution. In a certain sense, as the article acknowledges later, I care much much more about government consuming free software, as a neutral platform to avoid lock-in for themselves and the taxpayer, as well as providing an open foundation for integration and letting people use free software if they choose to (and not lock them to iOS and Android, for instance.) That alone is one of the biggest ways they can contribute. The actual code contribution will come naturally if they do that.
Just in case people don't realize, the author is Dries Buytaert who created drupal.
There's precedent for this type of thing in the EU. They sponsor(ed?) the bug bounty program for VLC Media Player[0] for example, among a few other OSS projects.
[0] - https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/vlc-patches-critical-flaw...
Good article. Could come across a bit like an unintentional bait and switch from the other point of view though, these projects love to see adoption but then require funding to maintain? Maybe setting the project up more commercially that then self funds the open source platform like Laravel is a more sustainable model?
Governments should do this, but as a but as a way to create value and do things that are strategic but not locally optimal. Not just because some lawyer writes in some extra funding for ffmpeg (or whatever).
Small teams making software to solve problems, and then gradually aiming to hire for end users to be able to code (this is a good way of achieving the "less people, higher salaries" dream)
If we treat it as infra then I fear slightly that we'd end up like the Victorian to modern transition where the idea of public infrastructure being run by the people who built lots of it in the first place is unimaginable i.e. Britain's railways and many roads were built to make money, but we are now (I'd argue) so risk adverse and allergic to prices being allowed to signal anything that we would never actually allow this to happen now.
If it's anything like hs2, we'll hire thousands of consultants on huge day rates who have zero incentive to ever build anything. Not an ideal model for open source funding.
Perhaps make open source work tax deductible, just like charity donations?
Fairly comprehensive and good blog post. Possibly too new to make it in, a proposal to take the learnings of the German STF (mentioned in the post) and expand it to the EU level for the next budget cycle (2028-2035) https://eu-stf.openforumeurope.org/
I’m kinda surprised we still don’t have publicly funded and run cloud yet and really only available in the academic settings if you’re affiliated with a university or research lab (and even then each of those have their own spins with lots of duplication).
Some of these decentralized and open source projects (eg gridcoin.us, or golem.network and akash.network) seem like interesting ideas that would benefit with a public/private incentive system too. Perhaps giving some finite compute to experiment with at little to no cost. Others can donate or are incentivized to provide unused compute.
There’s so much unused / underutilized resources out there that it would be a great boon to somehow make that available and further reduce barriers to entry. Aside from that it’s just a really interesting problem that intersects a lot of different areas.
Perhaps open source should update its license so that businesses profiting from it contribute a small portion of their earnings — say, 1% — to a global fund, whether allocated specifically to the open source maintainers and contributors or to the Decentralized Universal Kindness Income (DUKI /djuːki/) for all lives worldwide.
Still, most of these genius engineers likely don’t care much about such a small sum. They earn the honor and move on, while the charitable benefits flow to those who can monetize the software.
Treating open source as public infrastructure makes sense—so many critical projects run on volunteer labor, yet the whole ecosystem depends on them.
There’s a big difference between e.g. a public water utility and clean air (a textbook public good). The latter is non-excludable.
Open source can use ways to encourage donations and participation: one good way is adding some form of excitability. This could mean:
- increased access or influence over the project management and/or timeline
- increased access to the core team for troubleshooting, debugging, etc
- co-branding
- white labeling (maybe?)
- and so on
Isn't this what the "Freemium" model is supposed to resolve? If a open source package is popular, people will build businesses around it and people who use it can then purchase support and get bonus features.
This allows the marketplace to determine which project get supported rather than bureaucratic decree.
Quite often the public infrastructure (at least in some EU countries) is funded in the way so that the investors give the funds and then a small fee is collected and used to pay for the loan and maintenance. Sometimes after the loan is fully paid the infra usage fees are waived.
This is something like commercial open source
The money of running Linux in government is probably already flowing to the US, in the pockets of Redhat and IBM.
To support open source projects and developers, a GitHub-like platform managed by a nonprofit organization should be established, and it should issue its own token. Similarly, a fair system that distributes these tokens according to developers’ contributions would be much more appropriate.
Careful what you wish for. Government funding almost always comes with strings attached. Once a project becomes dependent on government, they will call the shots. Do what they want or get your funds yanked! This could include stuff like coding back doors for the NSA or implementing spyware.
I would be concerned how a future government would want to regulate open source if they took it over.
> 96% of that $8.8 trillion depends on just 5% of contributors
I have so much respect for the selfless 5%
In some places, funding public infrastructure like public infrastructure has barely proven to be successful and sustainable. Some places are underfunded, and it shows, and other places are well-funded but in crippling debt.
Some resources on funding open source here:
It's hard to count but my guess is that in France, the French government is the main creator of open-source software in France.
Contribution to existing projects lacks behind, but it's getting better.
libraries are going away in favor of coding up the entire stack without libraries using agents
The average developer, whether of open source or otherwise, refuses to use even the bare minimum of engineering discipline in realizing their programs, thereby resulting in an explosion of bugs that the rest of us have to pay for with our time, effort, and sanity.... and they want taxpayer money for that? HOW ABOUT NO. And don't tell me things would be different if we paid them since commercial software developers are certainly incentivized to do things properly and they STILL refuse to use proper engineering practices.
One yet another narrative that claim all people owe to an open source.
I believe, once in deep future, an open source developers will grown and stop repeating this sectarian mantra.
No one owes you anything. If you do opensource and you need in money - use your open source as marketing tool to promote services you sell.
It's simple as 2+2, I've mention it in my blog post https://vitonsky.net/blog/2025/06/24/open-source/
I think those who believe a companies will pay to you for a random OSS is just a kids. Ask people who can use a sheets, they explain you why your product will die with this approach.
yes, yes, everybody know that now...
but software is just not-a-base thing - it needs cpu's, computers. If you want realy independence do base thing - computer hardware ! Make small hardware that just can run Linux, can display things and use keyboard and mouse... Do eg. Dennmark do this ? Or Bosh ? Or...
Computers just to connect to internet and send some messages via IRC or something... ;)
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I agree completely.
20 years ago I gave Dries the domain Drupal.com for free to support open source.
I recently gave the domain MrBeast.org to Beast Philanthropy.
But more important than Open Source is Freedom. I recently acquired the domain antifascist.org to fight the rise of fascism. This will be a website to share information on protecting your loved ones - it will be open source in that everyone can contribute.
I welcome anyone that wants to help - send an email or use the contact form on the website.