/posts/oss-pledge.md
TL;DR: VoidZero has joined the Open Source Pledge and is donating $3,000 per developer at VoidZero per year to external open source projects.
Open source is at the heart of VoidZero. The company is founded on the open source projects we created and maintain, and our team members all have been prolific open source contributors and maintainers.
Outside of VoidZero, I have also maintained independent projects that are sustainable largely thanks to donations. From that experience a few things became clear to me:
- For most OSS projects, donations capture a disproportionally small fraction of the value they create.
- Donations from individual users do not scale.
- There are cultural and bureaucratic barriers that are preventing more companies from donating to OSS.
This is why I am excited to see companies like Sentry and the others who have already joined the pledge actively working to change the norm.
Today, we are happy to announce that VoidZero is joining this effort too.
Who Are We Sponsoring?
VoidZero is already sponsoring many contributors to our projects, e.g. Vite and Oxc. For the OSS pledge, however, donations are only eligible when made to projects that are not controlled by VoidZero. We are starting with the dependencies that our projects directly rely on, and individual developers that we believe are producing meaningful impact for the entire JavaScript ecosystem. As we scale as a company in the future, we will increase our donations accordingly to cover a wider range of projects and foundations.
We are donating a total of $31,488 per year, which is $3,148 per developer given our current team size. Here is a detailed breakdown of who we are funding:
| Project(s) | Developer | Monthly Recurring Amount |
|---|---|---|
| NAPI-RS | LongYinan (@Brooooooklyn) | $1000 |
| Multiple | Anthony Fu (@antfu)* | $512 |
| UnJS | Pooya Parsa (pi0) | $256 |
| Lightning CSS | Devon Govett (@devongovett) | $256 |
| Rollup | ** | $300 |
| pnpm | ** | $150 |
| PostCSS | ** | $150 |
*Anthony contributes to Vite and Vitest, which are projects related to VoidZero's ecosystem, but also maintains many other projects. We are sponsoring Anthony for $1024/month and counting half of that towards the pledge.
**Donations made to projects' respective Open Collective accounts instead of individuals.
This is just the beginning of our long-term commitment to open source. We look forward to improving the process, growing the budget, and supporting more projects in the future. We also hope that this will inspire more companies to join the pledge. Let's collectively change how businesses interact with open source for the better.
