On Companies Sponsoring Tech Communities

Before I say this: I'm writing it because I care about the people of these communities and of the Open Source Software (OSS) world more than I do their projects.

Also, I debated writing this because I don't think it will help my chances of staying gainfully employed or seeking new employment. Know that I'm trying my best to be realistic and speak to folks that need bluntness more than anything as they wonder how will they continue to sustain the projects they care about.

Why we're here

For those not in the PostgreSQL world, pgBackRest, a popular open source backup solution, announced the shutdown of development on the project. David Steele, the project's primary maintainer, emphasized the desire to have a company pay for them to continue development or to seek sustainable funding for the project through crowd-sourcing.

I have been maintaining pgBackRest and looking for a position that would allow me to continue the work, but so far I have not been successful. Likewise, my efforts to secure sponsorship have also fallen far short of what I need to make the project viable.

I don't know David, but the project seems important to both individuals and companies. Aiven themselves announced making the switch to using it earlier this year.

This conversation has me thinking about the similar troubles in funding that many developer communities are facing. I can't speak too much to companies funding OSS projects but I've had several conversations around community sponsorship.

Gabriele Bartolini, the creator of pgBackRest competitor Barman, wrote this in their blog about David's situation (emphasis is my own).

EDB is now taking that challenge to another level, at a much larger scale. Today, EDB funds engineers working full-time on PostgreSQL itself, on CloudNativePG, on Barman, on pgBouncer, and on the broader ecosystem. I want to say this publicly and without reservation: I am deeply grateful to EDB’s leadership for maintaining that commitment. It is not a given. It requires genuine conviction to keep investing in upstream open source when the returns are diffuse and the timelines are long.

Companies who "care about open source"

I work at Aiven to this day because there are amazing people that care about the open source community there. As the open source page states:

We don’t just run open source technologies, we help build them.

Our commitment extends to the long-term health of the open source world. We are proud members and sponsors of the foundations that sustain the ecosystem, ensuring these critical projects have the resources they need to thrive for years to come.

This was one of the reasons I wanted to join Aiven. Not that Microsoft wasn't invested in OSS (no matter what the haters say). I saw the work that Josep Prat and many others were doing with their OSPO, and what I could do with the Plankton Program (Aiven employees can be paid for working on OSS in their time off), and said I want to work at a company that is investing in the tools they rely on, to be proud to advocate on their behalf.

It was the coolest moment in my career to be able to contribute to Valkey as a part of my job. So much so that I still have a Valkey keychain attached to my Yubikey.

This year, though, something strange happened.

This past year, I was told that my work with Black Python Devs was beneficial to Aiven. I assumed that, if it was important to Aiven, then they would reach out to me about becoming a corporate sponsor. I'm still waiting.

I remember asking why Microsoft didn't sponsor the Python Software Foundation Developer in Residence anymore. I was told by someone at Microsoft, albeit someone not in charge of that decision, that they sponsor PyCon and hired the Faster CPython Team (which has since mostly been laid off), and that cost more than what it would cost to pay for the developer in residence. I wonder if Aiven has a similar mindset. Does Aiven's sponsorship budget allow for supporting smaller dependencies with goodwill donations, versus funding big-name foundation sponsorships that serve a marketing advantage? Why would they sponsor BPD when they can have me talk about them for free?

I think I have probably talked to about 20 people in BPD about Aiven in some way and I've even seen someone from BPD get hired at Aiven (Like what!!?!!). I bet if BPD was the number one entry on "How did you hear about us?" polling, the company would invest tons of money into us.

Aiven wants me to contribute to BPD, PG US, and other orgs because it links them to positive movements without having to pay more than my off-time or a reasonable amount of work hours. Microsoft was the same: indifferent, as long as we were doing our job and not asking for money¹.

I think EDB knows that their vector distance from awesome PG things serves as a cheaper marketing strategy for the database expert vertical. Crunchy was the same. I have said many times that people who went to Python events and wanted to talk about PostgreSQL knew about Crunchy Data because they were often at those events. EDB has a history of hiring of amazing people in the PG Community. They also make up about 10% of the talks at your favorite PG event².

The future for open source communities and funding

I don't want to say that I think it's over for sustainable open source and OSS Communities, but what I'm hearing from the organizers of these communities is one of two things has to be true in order to get funding that is impactful:

1. you are an AI-based product, and will create an opportunity for their product to gain more clout than their competitors (i.e. put AI in your name and people will throw money at you)
2. they are an AI-based product and your intellectual knowledge (and property) will give an advantage over the other competitors

This has all happened in the last six months. Anthropic acquires bun, a tool which "has been key in helping scale its infrastructure". OpenAI acquires Astral, which "power millions of developer workflows and have become part of the foundation of modern Python development". Lastly SpaceX options to acquire Cursor, which is the largest code editor with a GUI not owned by Microsoft.

It's not that communities aren't being funded. Funding is being taken away from areas that don't have concrete benefits towards industry trends. Conference sponsorships are harder to justify as people are no longer the most expensive resource. Companies are investing more and more money into AI R&D, GPUs, and token budgets.

I wish David the best of luck, but my bet would be that companies replace pgbackrest with some new tool based on popularity and things keep moving.

There is no project that is too important for a company to replace it. As communities and projects lose sustainability and fade away, they will be replaced with new solutions. Many CEOs and CTOs believe AI will make the transition to new tools easier than before.

What are OSS communities and projects to do?

If you are an open source maintainer, do the work while you like doing it. When you don't want to do the work, you just stop. The power of open source is that others are able to fork it, or you can donate it to an org, or you can pass the rights to someone else. Just like your job doesn't define who you are, neither does the open source work you do.

Black Python Devs has actually seen some support from companies that have some money to invest in us. More importantly, they have amazing people that know how that money impacts communities around the world and can make the justification to their company. But we aren't dumb. We've been asked about our metrics and we're doing more and more to support our sponsors. Our corporate sponsorship allows companies to advertise in our community, post jobs openings, and host events in our spaces in front of potentially thousands of developers with little to no competition. It's our job now to make sure that we market for these companies to emphasize how important it is that our corporate sponsors feel like the $10,000 we're asking of them is better spent with us than their LinkedIn or Meta ad spend or their Nth massive booth at SomethingCon.