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FOSDEM PWA

Funding Lessons Learned Panel

UD2.218A | Day 1 | 12:30 - 13:30 | Speakers: Gábor Szárnyas, Maria Majadas, Guillaume Monnet, Sriram Ramkrishna, Hannes Mühleisen, Lucie Anglade, Guillaume Ayoub

Funding Lessons Learned Panel
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Notes

Abstract

This is a session combining the experience of several FOSS projects in their funding journey. Each will have 10 minutes to present, after which a Q&A session will happen.

The presenting FOSS projects will be:

  • Mockoon is a popular open-source API tool, built and maintained from Luxembourg. In this talk, its creator shares the journey of growing a developer tool used by thousands, without external funding. Learn what worked (and didn't) in the pursuit of sustainability through sponsorships, community, and a cloud SaaS offering.

  • DuckDB is the fastest growing data management tool to date. Meanwhile, DuckDB is Free and Open Source Software under the permissive MIT license. DuckDB's development began inside an academic instituted funded by grants. We then moved to a bootstrapped spin-off and have been running ever since. In my short talk, I will describe the meandering route and mental processes that lead us to choose this funding model, the things we do and why we do them, the things to avoid and why to avoid them.

  • WeasyPrint is an open source Python library which transforms HTML/CSS into PDF, with the first commit dating back to April 2011. However we’ve only been making a living from it since 2020. We’ll present the evolution of our free software, how we transitioned from a project developed and used within a company to a product with paying clients, and discuss the different solutions we choose to earn money with free software.

  • GNOME, founded in 1997, is one of the two leading desktop projects on the Linux platform. In this talk, we will talk about the outcome of our community based fundraising, the outcomes we wanted to achieve and results of the fundraising campaign. The talk will conclude with our next steps with feedback from the audience.

Speakers

Gábor Szárnyas

Gábor Szárnyas is a database researcher at DuckDB Labs. He obtained his PhD in software engineering and was a post-doctoral researcher at CWI Amsterdam, the birthplace of DuckDB. He is also a core contributor and board member of the LDBC non-profit organization (ldbc.org) that defines benchmarks for graph data management systems.

Maria Majadas
Guillaume Monnet

Guillaume Monnet is the creator and maintainer of Mockoon, one of the most widely used open-source API mocking tools (1 million downloads, 7k GitHub stars, selected by GitHub Accelerator). A full-stack developer based in Luxembourg, Guillaume has over a decade of experience working with startups and building developer tools. He currently bootstraps Mockoon full-time, combining open-source development with a sustainable cloud offering, while occasionally advising startups as a freelance technical consultant and fractional CTO.

Sriram Ramkrishna

Sri Ramkrishna has been working in open source communities for nearly thirty years. He knows how to run things—programs, projects, events—but what he's actually good at is making people feel safe enough to collaborate honestly.

Hannes Mühleisen

Hannes Mühleisen is a creator of the DuckDB database management system and Co-founder and CEO of DuckDB Labs. He is Professor of Data Engineering at Radboud University Nijmegen. He is also a senior researcher at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam.

Lucie Anglade

Pythonista for nearly 10 years, I develop free software and provide my expertise to clients worldwide in automatic document generation.

Outside of this activity, I participate into the French speaking Python community by organising Python meetups in Lyon, and being a member of the PyConFR organising committee since 2015. I was also the chair of AFPy (the French-speaking Python Association) from 2023 to 2025.

I gave talks and workshops during PyLadiesCon, PyConFR, JDLL, SunnyTech, ParisWeb, VolcampIO and various meetups in Lyon.

Guillaume Ayoub

I’m Guillaume Ayoub, a French IT engineer with passions for Python and CSS.

I am a free software creator and developer, here are some of the projects I have taken care of:

  • WeasyPrint, a document generator based on web formats;
  • Radicale, a calendar and contact server;
  • CairoSVG, an SVG images to PDF or PNG converter;
  • Pyphen, a text hyphenation library.

I currently work most of my time on WeasyPrint, helping companies to generate beautiful and well structured PDFs all around the world.

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