Open-source software (OSS) has grown to power much of the infrastructure of the internet as well as countless industry-specific tools. While it’s clear that the surface-level cost of the software is free, that doesn’t mean that using OSS for free is a sustainable model. At G-Research, we believe in giving back to the communities that support us in a number of ways.
When quantifying financial contributions to OSS, some people like to focus solely on direct contributions to developers, while others prefer to include contributions to foundations and support contracts with OSS teams. Over the past 4-5 years, our OSS contribution has topped $500,000, with some estimates as high as a million dollars contributed, depending on what you include. Hopefully, these contributions are in service of making the OSS landscape more sustainable and by talking about our contributions openly, we can encourage other organizations to do the same.
Here’s how our funding of open source software breaks down:
- Foundation, Academic, and Corporate Sponsorships
- Direct Financial Contributions
- Fellowships and Internships
We’ll discuss how we think about each one of these approaches.
Foundation, Academic, and Corporate Sponsorships
Foundation Sponsorships
OSS foundations are crucial to our work in open source. Even though G-Research doesn’t always benefit directly from these contributions on a feature level, we still reap rewards. Supporting these foundations allows them to support healthy ecosystems for the projects we rely on, and we benefit both financially and in improving the quality of the software that we use.
The foundations we support include:
- Linux Foundation
- Linux Foundation Europe
- OpenStack-OpenInfra Foundation
- Cloud-Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)
- OpenSSF
- FINOS Open Source in Finance Forum (event sponsorship)
- OpenUK (in kind)
- Diana Initiative (security conference)
Working with these foundations confers several benefits unique to their role within these communities.
A critical benefit gained from working through foundations is an attempt to separate the governance of projects from a single corporate interest. Some critical software projects would simply not be trusted if they were solely maintained by one company or individual, for example. Outsourcing the project stewardship portion allows competitors to work together towards win-win scenarios that hopefully benefit the entire community. Further, there is often an increased expectation of good project hygiene for these projects: a code of conduct, working build systems, security reviews and publicly published information on the progress of the project itself.
Foundations are also one of the few places that imbue OSS with political clout. For example, in the EU, the Linux Foundation Europe made its voice heard when early drafts of the Cyber Resilience Act included language that would have dire, negative impact on OSS in the EU (and probably beyond). Other voices were a part of this lobbying work, to be sure, but the LF Europe is one obvious place that we can ask to represent our views when it comes to EU-wide legislation.
Academic Sponsorships
We currently sponsor a couple of academic initiatives:
- UC Berkeley EPIC Data Labs
- i-Scale (a part of the Mass Open Cloud Alliance, MOC)
Academia has always been a fertile ground for open source contributions. We believe that fostering research that results in open source projects is a benefit to everyone involved. As a research organization ourselves, we benefit by seeing some of the most cutting-edge technology and are able to provide input for how these projects might be applied in real-world applications. The net result is that more research can be explored with more potential for anyone who wants to pick up and continue development of these projects in a non-academic setting.
Corporate Sponsorships
G-Research supports some OSS organizations in a way that threads the needle between outright philanthropy and a software support contract. For example, Real-Logic (now Adaptive) and UrsaLabs (now Voltron Data) oversaw the development of two critical projects for us: Aeron and Arrow. With both companies, we secured an agreement which is part support contract part community support: we get some occasional support troubleshooting while we help them remain viable companies and ensure that the communities they have built continue to prosper.
Sometimes, our support for a product is more experimental and speculative. Our support for JuliaHub (formerly Julia Computing), for example, was driven by a sense that our researchers might find the language useful. But to make Julia available in a way that would give it a chance for success, we knew we needed to spend a little money and get some support and training. At the same time, we know that investing in JuliaHub also helps the future of Julia in the event that we begin to use it in a production setting.
So, for a variety of reasons, by financially supporting these OSS products we can continue to — or start to — depend on them in our software stack.
Direct contributions to individuals and projects
It’s also important to bring funding directly to the projects that we rely upon even when they don’t have the backing of a larger company or institution. The three organizations we use most consistently to fund projects directly are Open Collective, GitHub Sponsors, and Tidelift. By sponsoring through these channels we can have a direct impact that is both tangible and meaningful for the health of those projects.
A secondary benefit of these types of contributions is that they are indicators to other people and companies that a project is worth sponsoring. It’s our hope that these contributions help lead the way for more people to get comfortable giving in this way and start piling on. If all of us were giving a little bit to all of these projects, a lot more of them would be sustainable.
Open source fellowships
The third critical area of our OSS contribution is in open source fellowships. Specifically, we pay Major League Hacking to run an open-source fellowship program for us. Major League Hacking is an organization that introduces students to open source software development and places them in companies for three-month-long fellowships. They also provide opportunities for people who have been much less represented in software development historically.
For G-Research, this results in multiple wins. We get meaningful contributions to our projects and also have the satisfaction of helping budding open-source developers get over-the-hump with open source contributions and engage in a wide array of communities.
This last point is the most important. We believe that if the open source community is going to grow and prosper, we need to make sure that there is a healthy influx of talent that understands open source software and can move freely in that universe. By training people at the very start of their careers to have good open source engineering principles, the whole community benefits. We don’t expect an immediate direct benefit from this but we believe that every improvement we can help make in this direction will benefit us eventually.
The Sum Total
We’re proud to give back to open source, and feel that we do so in a meaningful way. By talking about our contributions in posts like this, we hope to normalize corporate funding for open source projects. Our focus is only on a small part of the whole universe of open source projects and we need more organizations contributing across the entire spectrum of businesses and institutions. Together we can have a much stronger, healthy community.