Exploring Sustainability and Funding in Open Source Projects

This chapter explores the critical role of funding methods such as sponsorship and donations in sustaining open source projects. The discussion highlights the challenges of demonstrating funding effectiveness and considers future possibilities, including venture capital involvement and associated risks.

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Guest

Brian Douglas

Panelist

Richard Littauer

Show Notes

In this episode of Sustain, host Richard Littauer talks with Brian “bdougie” Douglas, founder and CEO of Open Sauced. They discuss the multifaceted aspects of sustaining open source projects, Brian’s journey in developer advocacy, and the unique goals of Open Sauced. Brian shares insights from his experiences at GitHub and Netlify, elaborates on concepts like lottery factor and the significance of unique issue authors, and tackles the challenges of maintaining open source sustainability. He also explores the balance of addressing enterprise needs while supporting smaller, less visible projects and emphasizes the importance of education and community engagement in open source. Press download now!

[00:01:54] Brian discusses his background at GitHub and Netlify, his role in promoting GraphQL, GitHub Actions, Codespaces, and the inception of Open Sauced.

[00:03:08] We hear about the features of Open Sauced’s dashboard which enhances GitHub insights, OSSF scorecards, and workspace customizations for managing multiple projects.

[00:04:31] Open Sauced’s business model is currently founded by VC money and aims to serve large organizations with significant open source dependencies, and Brian talks about the team size and funding history.

[00:06:08] Brian elaborates on Open Sauced’s long-term sustainability plan, focusing on enterprise-level solutions for open source project observability and contributions.

[00:09:31] There’s a discussion on how Open Sauced interacts with open source communities and the importance of real-world testing and contributions to open source projects.

[00:11:06] Richard highlights the FOSS Funders initiative, encouraging companies to support open source projects financially and through active participation.

[00:12:44] Brian shares insights on effective metrics for evaluating open source projects, emphasizing the importance of engaging with unique issue authors rather than focusing solely on superficial metrics like pull requests, and discusses his approach to starting meaningful conversations in the open source community.

[00:16:08] Brian explains why he renamed “Lottery Factor” to “Contributor Absence Factor,” and discusses the Pgvector project to illustrate the importance of understanding the “Contributor Absence Factor” and the sustainability concerns when a project relies heavily on a few contributors.

[00:18:20] We learn more about how Open Sauced sources its data, including their use of GitHub’s events feed and their development of the “Pizza Oven” tool to generate insights from Git repositories.

[00:20:21] Richard and Brian discuss the challenges of maintaining an open source ethos when dealing with large companies’ internal projects, avoiding becoming merely service providers for large corporate entities.

[00:24:14] Brian discusses the long-term implications of open source projects that receive substantial funding or become integrated into larger corporate frameworks.

[00:27:27] Richard brings up the difficulty many open source projects face in accessing significant funding and Brian shares his vision for supporting less prominent open source projects drawing analogies from his personal experiences.

[00:32:42] Richard questions the “up the chain” analogy, comparing it to a pyramid scheme or academia’s tenure track. Brian acknowledges the need to support contributors at all levels, not just those at the top, and he introduces the concept of a S Bomb to provide transparency about project dependencies.

[00:39:36] Find out where you can follow Brian on the web.

Spotlight

[00:40:17] Richard’s spotlight is Mr. Carreras, an awesome music teacher.
[00:40:59] Brian’s spotlight is Dawn Foster at the CHAOSS Project and the CHAOSS Practitioner Guides.