10 Years Of Open Source Funding Trends: A Deep Dive

How do corporate dollars flow into the open source ecosystem?

Corporate investment in open source can change significantly over time in response to factors such as economic performance, leadership changes, company priorities, and industry trends. While these investments might be well-tracked within corporate sponsorship programs or by sponsored organizations, there is no clear visibility into spending across corporations and sponsored organizations.

In this talk, I will present an analysis of corporate spending on open source over the last ten years. Based on publicly available information, this analysis will highlight key observations and produce actionable recommendations for sponsors and sponsees alike. We will look closely at how sponsorships have evolved across foundations and events year over year, and look at which companies are investing the most in open source - and where they are investing.

This work is research output from the FOCUSED project, funded by the Ford Foundation, Sloan Foundation, Mozilla, Omidyar Network and Open Society Foundations as part of the 2020 Digital Infrastructure Grants program.