How companies are sponsoring OSS

This week we’re celebrating Maintainer Month along with our friends at GitHub. Open source runs the world, but who runs open source? Maintainers. Open source maintainers are behind the software we use everyday, but they don’t always have the community or support they need. That’s why we’re celebrating open source maintainers during the month of May. Today’s conversation features Alyssa Wright (Bloomberg), Chad Whitacre (Sentry), and Duane O’Brien (Creator of the FOSS Contributor Fund and framework). We get into all the details, the why, the hows, and the struggles involved for companies to support open source.

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Sponsors:

• Sentry – Get to the root cause of an error or latency issue faster by seeing all the technical details related to that issue in one visual replay on your web application. Use the code CHANGELOG and get the team plan free for three months.
• Rocky Linux – Enterprise Linux, the open source community way.
• DevCycle – Build better software with DevCycle. Feature flags, without the tech debt. DevCycle is a Feature Flag Management platform designed to help you build maintainable code at scale.
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.

Featuring:

• Duane O'Brien – Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Chad Whitacre – Twitter, GitHub
• Alyssa Wright – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

We’re at Open Source Summit North America 2022 this week. If you’re there, come see us at the Maintainer Month booth in the expo area.

• FOSS Funders (fossfunders.com) - Working together to fund open source.
• Maintainer Month
• Bloomberg Launches FOSS Fund to Support Free and Open Source Projects
• Bloomberg Corporate Philanthropy
• Hire My Team
• Changelog Interviews #392: Indeed’s FOSS Contributor Fund with Duane O’Brien
• Sovereign Tech Fund
• Changelog Interviews #490: Schneier on security for tomorrow’s software
• Investing in Open Source: The FOSS Contributor Fund by Duane O’Brien, Mandy Grover
• Changelog Interviews #515: ANTHOLOGY — Advocating for and supporting open source

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:00) - Maintainer Month!!
(01:37) - Sponsor: Sentry
(03:53) - Start the show!
(07:46) - We're DevRel for the software community
(10:30) - The FOSS Contributor Fund
(14:01) - $2k per engineer to open source
(16:05) - Bloomberg's FOSS Fund
(19:12) - Corporate philanthropy at Bloomberg
(21:41) - The unique advantage to fund OSS
(23:22) - Sponsor: Rocky Linux
(25:59) - It's common sense, not philanthropy
(30:21) - Something over nothing
(33:51) - Chad, "stir up that pot."
(37:19) - By and for the people
(43:24) - Non-funding things
(49:12) - Sponsor: DevCycle
(51:48) - It begins with people who care
(1:00:12) - We appreciate maintainers!
(1:06:48) - This is an ongoing conversation
(1:08:25) - Up next week...

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