Nico Prat
Giving back to the community
Thank open-source maintainers by sponsporing them
Standing on the shoulders of open-source#
As every web app developer we rely a lot on open-source projects. It's easy to forget how much of a special environment we work in, but it's pretty rare to be able to build so much amazing things practically for free!
We usually kinda help by creating issues and pull requests, or giving feedback when needed, but it didn't feel enough. Actually there were some interesting debates online this year about open-source sustainability, and money is obviously at the heart of the question. Some pretty big companies just profit without giving back, but we didn't feel concerned as for now we're not that big and it's hard for startups to find cash to give, especially when competition is tough and recruiting is expensive.
But this year we finally had the budget to sponsor some open-source maintainers! We tried to focus on people instead of organizations, as we thought that's where money lacks the most. We also tried to use it like a "thanks" instead of an "investment", so we gave on tools we already use, not necessarily those we plan to use more in the next few months or years.
We decided to give it as a "one-time" donation, because we used our own (web) team budget and we can't know for sure we will be able to maintain this every year for now. We thought it would be a nice Christmas gift! There was 1,500€ left at the end of the year, that's not much for some projects, but we thought it would be a good start anyway.
We selected 12 projects or people that were available on Github Sponsors or OpenCollective for the sake of accountability simplicity. Here's the list of those we sponsored this year in no specific order:
Eduardo San Martin Morotehttps://github.com/sponsors/posva
Johnson Chuhttps://github.com/sponsors/johnsoncodehk
Anthony Fuhttps://github.com/sponsors/antfu
Guillaume Chauhttps://github.com/sponsors/Akryum
Yosuke Otahttps://github.com/sponsors/ota-meshi
Thorsten Lünborghttps://github.com/sponsors/LinusBorg
kazuya kawaguchihttps://github.com/sponsors/kazupon
Daniel Roehttps://github.com/sponsors/danielroe
Gregor Beckerhttps://github.com/sponsors/codedredd
As you can see there are a lot of maintainers of the Vue ecosystem because we rely a lot on them, that's where we found the most "small" projects that could benefit from relatively small donations, and because we saw some of them at VueConf Amsterdam 2022 too!
Wishing you a merry Christmas! 🎅