Ecosystem Funds: Curated Support For Your Critical Software Dependencies

Today Open Source Collective is launching Ecosystem Funds, making it easier to support your critical software dependencies.

Supporting the software we use, not just the software we see

Building an empirically complete picture of your software’s ‘deep dependencies’ can take months of investigative work and analysis to uncover projects that are looking for your support, and to get it to them.

But, fundamentally, you know what technologies you utilise… right?

Open Collective is built on Next.js, Redis, Postgres, and GraphQL. With a broad understanding of the technologies we depend upon it should be possible to hand the responsibility of getting financial support to the packages, and the people behind them to someone. Right?

Well, now you can.

Today Open Source Collective is launching Funds to support hundreds of open source Ecosystems centred on a language, framework, or package, providing you with a shortcut to supporting your dependencies, without having to invest months of your time.

Open Source Collective x Ecosyste.ms

In 2022 Open Source Collective and Schmidt Futures invested in building shared infrastructure for a growing community of researchers, policymakers, developers, and funders seeking to identify, secure, and sustain critical open source components.

Ecosyste.ms tracks billions of events from hundreds of sources, creating the most complete (and free) picture of open source software in the world. ecosyste.ms helped Microsoft change their approach to funding and now it’s going to change yours.

Open Source Collective is combining ecosyste.ms’ knowledge and Open Collective’s transparent fundraising and money management to create a uniquely traceable system for supporting your dependencies. You’ll see exactly where your money went, and how it has been spent. All supported by our fiscal sponsorship program and our team.

How It Works

Sponsor the technology you rely on, we’ll do the rest.

No, really, we mean it. You select one or more open source ecosystems and donate a single or recurring sponsorship. We handle everything else.

We’ll direct your money (minus a 10% management fee) to the right people, using the tools projects themselves have chosen to manage their finances. We support funding through GitHub Sponsors, Thanks.dev, StackAid, LF Community Bridge, and of course Open Collective. If a project hasn’t listed a funding source, we invite maintainers to collect their donation on behalf of their community, or to let us know where they would like to do so. If they still don’t accept your donation, it will be redistributed to the fund for other projects. This process will continue monthly, supported by our amazing team.

Not Just For Corporates

Despite our best efforts, much of the funding for open source today goes to a small number of well-known packages and tools. We hope this announcement will go some way to alleviating that, but we call upon you, the open source maintainer, to do your part by supporting the software you depend upon too.

Testing In Production With Sentry

Today we’re announcing Ecosystem Funds with Sentry, who have committed $67,500 to the Rust, Python, Django, and Javascript Ecosystems. We’re distributing funds to 268 projects within these communities, many of which have a chosen method for accepting financial support.

Getting started

Over the coming weeks we’ll be completing our onboarding and sponsor experiences. If you can’t wait that long get in touch and we’ll work with you to sponsor the ecosystems you depend upon today.