Open source funding: you’re doing it wrong

After a decade saying we need to support our digital infrastructure, are we any closer to doing so?

In this talk we hope to convince you that observable usage is the best determinant of open source ‘criticality’ and to argue that, if this is the case, much of the funding flowing to open source projects today is misdirected.

Using open and freely available data from thousands of sources, helpfully collated by ecosyste.ms, we demonstrate how a few popular projects absorb much of the funding that we see while the most critical projects, and the communities that depend upon them, miss out.

We show how today’s intractable approaches to funding open source projects make collectively supporting our shared digital infrastructure impossible, and advocate for more openness between and amongst both supporters and open source communities to enable better coordination and collaboration.