File 03 — Who Pays
The funding gap between the software the industry depends on and the people who maintain it.
Photo: Andrey Matveev / PexelsIn 2023 Denis Pushkarev, the sole maintainer of core-js — a JavaScript polyfill library with over 250 million weekly npm downloads — published a detailed public accounting of the project's funding, his personal circumstances, and the gap between the library's adoption and its financial support.
Photo: Jitte Davidson / Pexelscurl, maintained primarily by Daniel Stenberg since 1998, is embedded in billions of devices and shipped by Apple, Microsoft, and most Linux distributions; Stenberg has written publicly and repeatedly about the project's funding model, the support burden, and what 'free software' costs the people who write it.
Photo: sovereign.techThe Sovereign Tech Fund, backed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action and launched in 2022, funds maintenance work on open-source infrastructure projects — not new features, but the unglamorous work of security fixes, dependency updates, and documentation.
Photo: Open Collective logo 2021 · Wikimedia CommonsGitHub Sponsors (launched 2019), Open Collective, and Tidelift each propose a different structure for routing money from users and companies to open-source maintainers; this piece compares what each platform offers, citing their own published terms and the documented amounts raised by named projects.
Photo: ThisIsEngineering / PexelsThe dominant mechanism by which open-source infrastructure is funded is not donation platforms but direct employment — Google, Meta, Red Hat, Canonical, and others employ engineers specifically to maintain upstream projects.