In 2022 we launched ecosyste.ms to a small number of researchers, developers and adjacent professionals.

Three years later and ecosyste.ms has been used to launch a new kind of open source security company, expanded support for an established security product, and changed Microsoft’s approach to funding open source. We’ve helped countless others publish research on and/or fund open source software including The République Française, The Linux Foundation, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, The Sovereign Tech Agency, and The Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund.

Today ecosyste.ms serves 40m requests, comprising 300GB of data and 15m worker requests. Every. Single. Day.

But all is not well.

Licensing in support of a common goal

ecosyste.ms was developed with a simple goal: to build shared infrastructure for those seeking to create a sustainable and secure foundation of open source software. Infrastructure for infrastructure, if you will. This ethos extends to ecosyste.ms itself: our code and data are licensed (AGPL and CC-BY-SA respectively) to ensure that the community can use the services we provide, free of charge, if they contribute their work back to that same community.

That said, we know that commercial organisations have an important role to play in achieving our goal. So, for those that wish to operate an instance of ecosyste.ms or utilise ecosyste.ms’ data for their own use, we offer less restrictive licences, available to purchase through our non-profit host Open Source Collective (OSC). OSC are registered vendors to most large open-source supporting organisations - just email us to discuss terms.

And that’s just the beginning

Building on ecosyste.ms success

ecosyste.ms is at capacity, both in terms of our ability to serve traffic, and to build the services we believe our users need. Revenues from licence sales are no longer covering the costs of hosting a service storing terabytes of data and serving 12m unique users every month. On top of this our users are asking for higher rate limits, priority traffic, and more data.

Happily we are working with a non-profit organisation to fund the next phase of ecosyste.ms’ development, which we hope to announce soon. Development will focus on traffic management, documentation, developer experience, a new plugin architecture, and a pubsub pipeline that allows users to process data for their own use, or contribute analysis back to the commons.

If that is of interest to you or your organisation contact us and we’ll include you in the development process. In the meantime you can support the project by:

👩‍💻 Contributing to ecosyste.ms on GitHub
🤝 Purchasing a data licence
🙏 Donating on Open Collective