Successful Open Source projects must transition from pure volunteerism to include paid contributions, mirroring how public goods like roads evolved historically.
Moving beyond the charity framework
A healthy ecosystem for supporting open source in the long term.
How to manage casual contributors to open source projects
Try these strategies to better utilize contributions from your project's episodic volunteers.
Home - Open Source Collective
Open Source Collective is a non-profit fiscal host for open source projects. Get Transparent fundraising, money management, and legal representation
AI creates asymmetric pressure on Open Source
How Open Source communities can adapt to AI-generated contributions without overwhelming Open Source maintainers
The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders
The open source movement runs on the heroic efforts of not enough people doing too much work. They need help.
The New Deal for the Open Source Community
Building the Economic Layer to our Digital Infrastructure
About - Open Collective
Open Collective was founded by idealists to make online communities more sustainable. What began as a tool for open source and grassroots groups has grown into a global infrastructure for transparency, collaboration, and shared financial stewardship.
Open Source infrastructure deserves a business model
Open Source infrastructure is essential, invisible, and chronically underfunded. A more sustainable approach may be to connect the cost of running that infrastructure to the organizations that rely on it most.
The Missing Middle of Open Source
Why serious, maintainer-driven projects struggle to sustain themselves—and what it will take to fix it.
Open Source or Open Core: Why Should You Care?
Open source software has gained its significant foothold because the community development model works everywhere. Its momentum has moved it into the underlying infrastructure of some of the most sophisticated web scale companies, like Facebook and Google. Open source underpinnings now drive many of the most significant advances in the worlds of cloud and big data.
Prosperous Software Movement | Open Source Observer
Bringing sustainable funding to public goods by revenue-sharing towards dependencies
What does a sustainable open source project look like?
Over the past couple years, thanks in part to Nadia Eghbal’s Roads and Bridges report, the world is starting to see the need for long-term…
How to become an amazing contributor (to an open source project)
It's a busy morning here in New York City. My email inbox is full of pleasant surprises. The first is a patch for one of my open source projects. A second will appear this afternoon. A third should come late at night—or maybe tomorrow–from a new contributor. Alongside my day job, I contribute and manage open source projects. The number of projects I work on has grown from a couple of small tools to well over a dozen in the last three years. Open source has become a great way to learn new technology, experiment with modern software development practices, and, of course, meet other like-minded engineers. I find that seeing great contributors send working and tested code provides a unique feeling of accomplishment, as powerful as having many satisfied users of my own applications or strong revenues posted by the employer that pays my bills.
Funded projects | Scaling Trust
Explore the projects we're funding in the Scaling Trust opportunity space.
Open source projects are a lot more exciting than roads and bridges
In July, the Ford Foundation released “Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure”, a report on the problem of…
Transmutations
We know from experience and empirical analysis that open source and open standards projects drift into oligarchies that struggle to reform themselves and become ossified. Often, we can simply let them die and replace them with fresher alternatives, but when that's a costly option we can learn from theoretical models of institutional change to understand how to compost the oligarchy and regrow the project from within.
