Towards a sustainable solution to open source sustainability

A presentation at OpenJS World in June 2020 in by Tobie Langel

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Towards a sustainable solution to open source sustainability

Tobie Langel, Principal, UnlockOpen

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The Heartbleed Bug

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Heartbleed bug impact

👩⚕ 4.5 MILLION The number of US patient records whose confidentiality was compromised. 💰 $500 MILLION Estimated cost to the industry.

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Pivotal moment where tech industry realizes open source is:

🌏 UBIQUITOUS 2/3 of active sites on the Internet rely on the OpenSSL library. ⚠ CRITICAL OpenSSL encrypts private communications, bank transactions, medical records, etc. 💸 UNDERFUNDED Only 1 full-time maintainer, shoestring budget ($2k/year).

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Core Infrastructure Initiative

🏭 INDUSTRY-WIDE EFFORT Organized by the Linux Foundation. Backed by tech giants. 💰 MULTI-MILLION $ FUND Administered by Linux Foundation and a steering group of industry experts. 🎯 GOAL Harden the security of key open source projects. 👓 STRICT FOCUS ON “CORE INFRA” The goal is to prevent a new Heartbleed. Not to make open source as a whole more sustainable.

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Patreon

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Patreon

🎨 FOCUS Originally aimed at artists, musicians & writers. 🌊 GOAL Create a “meaningful revenue stream.” 🏆 SUCCESS STORY Evan You (pictured), creator of Vue.js. Nets over $17K per month. ❌ REPRODUCIBLE? Not really. Very few devs have a large enough revenue stream to work on OSS full-time.

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GitCoin

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GitCoin

🏪 GITHUB ISSUE MARKET Allows project owners to add bounties to GitHub issues. Devs submit their work as a pull request. 💰 $500,000 Amount of bounties paid on the platform in 2018. ⛓ BLOCKCHAIN-BASED Developers received bounties in Ether. 🌳 WHOLE ECOSYSTEM GitCoin also provides an ad network (CodeFund), and a Patreon-like solution (Grants).

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CodeFund

👩💻 CONTEXTUAL ADS Advertise on the websites of open source projects. 💼 HIRING FOCUS Dedicated solution for hiring developers. 💵 $6K PER MONTH Redistributed to project maintainers out of $10K monthly revenue.

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Open Source Capital

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Open Collective

🔍 WHAT DOES IT DO? Provides non profit status (501c6) to open source projects & transparency as to how funds are used. 🏆 SUCCESS STORY WebPack reached $400K+ yearly funding in 2018. Win-win situation for key sponsor (Trivago). 🐿 LONG TAIL PROBLEM A few projects are getting most of the funding (>25% of total funds for WebPack in 2017).

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Open Collective + Back Your Stack

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Tidelift

🛥 WHAT IS IT? Red Hat business model for the long tail. 🛎 SERVICES Provides security updates, maintenance, and legal assurances for all open source projects in an organization’s stack. 👨💻 HOW? By paying the actual maintainers to do the work. 🏆 SUCCESS STORY None yet. Still too early.

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Limitations of addressing open source sustainability through funding alone

📡 DOES IT SCALE? Is the current level of funding realistic compared to open source ubiquity? 💵 IS MONEY EVEN WHAT’S MISSING? Are we trying to solve the right problem? 🔮 IS IT A DESIRABLE OUTCOME? Do we want a future with charity-funded open source developers on one side, and corporate developers writing “glue code” on the other? 💸 WHAT IS THE REAL VALUE OF OPEN SOURCE? Isn’t it time to look beyond the source code?

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Limitations of addressing open source sustainability through funding alone

📡 DOES IT SCALE? Is the current level of funding realistic compared to open source ubiquity?

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$100

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$10,000 Monthly revenue of CodeFun.

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1 million dollars Amount collected by Open Collective in a year. Amount Tidelift committed to pay developers.

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Worldwide developer population

Non-pro 4.30M Full-time Part-time 11.65M 6.35M Source: IDC, Worldwide Developer Census, 2018.

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1 million dollars Amount collected by Open Collective in a year. Amount Tidelift committed to pay developers.

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100 million dollars 1 million dollars $10,000

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1 billion dollars

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10 billion dollars

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1 trillion dollars

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1 million dollars

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Limitations of addressing open source sustainability through funding alone

💵 IS MONEY EVEN WHAT’S MISSING? Are we trying to solve the right problem?

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Developers working on the Linux kernel

Non employed 7.7% Employed 92.3% Source: Linux Kernel Development report 2016.

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Limitations of addressing open source sustainability through funding alone

🔮 IS IT A DESIRABLE OUTCOME? Do we want a future with charity-funded open source developers on one side, and corporate developers writing “glue code” on the other?

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“[P]art of the reason much of open source is so good, and often so superior to closed-source commercial projects, is the natural boundary of constraints. If you are not being paid or otherwise compensated directly for your work, you’re less likely to needlessly embellish it. You’re solving the problems for you and your mates, likely in the simplest way you could, so you can get back to whatever you originally intended to do before starting to shave the yak.” —DHH, The Perils of mixing open source and money, Nov 12, 2013.