FOSDEM 2025 and Financing Free Software Development
-
Open Source Pledge ☛ Why and How Companies Should Pay Open Source Maintainers (A talk from FOSDEM 2025)ww
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.
-
Vlad-Stefan Harbuz ☛ Why and How Companies Should Pay Open Source Maintainers
On 2 Feb 2025, I gave a talk at FOSDEM 2025 on improving the sustainability of the Open Source ecosystem, titled “Why and How Companies Should Pay Open Source Maintainers”. This page includes information on this talk, as well as ways to submit your own feedback and views on these topics.
-
FOSDEM ☛ FOSDEM 2025 - Why and How Companies Should Pay Open Source Maintainers
Virtually all companies use Open Source software, making a critical subset of the Open Source ecosystem crucial for everything from watching YouTube videos to working with medical records. But the companies that use Open Source software rarely pay the maintainers of the software they depend on. I explain that this can lead to serious issues in the Open Source ecosystem, such as the international security risks we saw with the XZ backdoor and the Log4Shell vulnerability.
I explain that, if companies paid the Open Source maintainers they depend on, the Open Source ecosystem would become more sustainable and stable while retaining the significant economical advantages provided by Open Source governance models, and companies would benefit from this.