As some of you who subscribe to our monthly update might have noticed:
In 2024 Open Source Collective accepted its 50 millionth dollar for our open source projects.
This is a huge milestone for us professionally, and for me personally. In March 2021, when I first joined as executive director, Open Collective had literally just started covering its costs. Open Source Collective had accepted $4.4m in donations, with all other hosts and collectives on the platform adding another $3m.
In 2021 we worked on our strategy, which was published the following January. Our goals were: to take an ecosystem wide approach to supporting open source software — for which last month's launch of Ecosystem Funds was long overdue. We wanted to make contributing to open source an easy business decision — on which we hope to announce another project next month. Finally, we wanted to remove the stigma around money in open source.
That year we paid 44% of the funds we accepted. Three years later I am more than happy to say Open Source Collective paid $9.7m dollars to open source maintainers in 2024, a massive 85% of the $12.6m we accepted (after fees). Of the $9.7m 85% was paid to maintainers and contributors for their time, the remainder being used to predominantly cover the costs of servers, subscriptions, and the occasional finger-puppet.
I'm not about to claim that we're responsible in any way for this shift. But I'm excited to see that money is, for our projects at least, no longer a polarising issue in open source.
I can't wait to see what that means for the future.
The keen-eyed among you will have noticed that the strategy I put together, with the support of a few amazing people, 'concludes' in 2025. We've spent the last three months looking critically at how the world has changed, and how our place in it might need to change with it. While the core of our work will continue to be our fiscal hosting program we will continue to commit ourselves to supporting OFiCo, the new, non-profit home of Open Collective, and to support our community through tools and platforms like ecosyste.ms, and Ecosystem Funds. I won't go into more here but expect an update on our strategy soon.
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