Chad and I spent the last few days at FOSDEM — the largest Open Source software conference in Europe.
We spent most of our time in the Funding the FOSS Ecosystem track, which was packed with good advice on funding Open Source projects. Ludovic Dubost told us about how 20-year-old XWiki finds funding, Amy Parker taught us about the importance of storytelling, and Andrew Nesbitt and Benjamin Nickolls showed us what you get when you crawl 230 million repositories.
I gave a talk on “Why and How Companies Should Pay Open Source Maintainers”, in which I drew on the philosophy of economics to explain why companies should pay maintainers, then built on my experience at thanks.dev to suggest an algorithmic way to decide how to split up funds across many projects in a dependency tree.
Check it out here:
Many kind folks — some from the Sovereign Tech Agency, ecosyste.ms and the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation — gave me feedback on how these strategies might be improved, so that the Open Source Pledge can help get maintainers paid. Chad and I also met many friends new and old, such as OpenCollective steward Xavier Damman, investor Konstantin Vinogradov and others.
It was great to see you, FOSDEM friends!