Community sourced list of critical and/or underfunded FOSS projects

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Over the past few years, we have come across ample studies, articles and unfortunate incidents in the FOSS ecosystem that highlight an age old challenge - The F/OSS sustainability crisis. Despite exponentially increasing adoption, a good number of critically important FOSS projects remain severely underfunded.

Thankfully, we now see organizations wanting to give back to FOSS as well. In the last few months alone, multiple initiatives have been launched addressing this problem.

It is unclear if these initiatives have been able to reach critical projects yet. A few days ago, FLOSS/fund released a dump of their funding request database. Surprisingly, very few major projects have applied for funding (some exceptions beings VueJS, Zig Lang etc.) The overall funding requested seems pretty low as well.

@Shree_Kumar’s summarises this pretty well in his blog post analysing the request DB -

My opinion is that the numbers that the Fund has been able to attract till now are unexpectedly low. For perspective, GitHub has an estimated 100 million users, and at-least 28 million public repositories. Even considering that not everyone and not every project needs funding, we are staring at a Jupiter sized gap.

What can’t be measured, can’t be improved. To effectively move the needle, we need to build a good understanding of where we are right now. We need hard data. We need many many more projects to submit funding.json. By the way, finding more projects is not the burden of the Fund. The Fund is probably happy for this initiative to grow organically. It’s just me here trying to convince you that we need warp speed on this to reach a sustainable system faster.

The idea behind this forum post is to create a community sourced list of underfunded FOSS projects, whom we can then reach out to and tell them about these initiatives.

I say “critical and/or underfunded” projects because even if a project doesn’t require funding at the moment, adding a funding.json file (in case of FLOSS/fund) serves as a meaningful social experiment.

If you know of any FOSS projects that we should engage with on this front, please reply to this forum post. Links to their public repos, ways to contact them/communication channels, and any info on the current funding situation of these projects will be of great help!

P.S - FOSS United also runs a grants program for Indian FOSS projects. Hopefully this thread can serve as a means to identify future grantees.

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From telegram -

https://ntp.org is severely underfunded. Slayer reached out telling them about floss.fund, they will be creating a funding.json soon!

image

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OpenSSL - The project has a budget of less than $1 million USD per year and relies primarily on donations.

https://github.com/sponsors/openssl

“In March 2024, the OpenSSL Foundation undertook a major organizational reform and decided to temporarily disable individual donations until we better understood our financial situation under the new governance structure. Since then, the OpenSSL Foundation has taken on significant additional financial responsibilities. We’ve been expanding our staff, investing more deeply in community education and engagement, and developing other longer-term plans in service of our non-commercial communities.

The Foundation is utilizing historical cash reserves to make these initial investments, but our future revenue plan relies almost exclusively on fundraising”

“The Heartbleed vulnerability in 2014 highlighted the lack of funding of OpenSSL. The Linux Foundation therefore started the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) to gather funding from organisations, and they paid for two full time people to work on OpenSSL for three years, as well as a security audit. While we were extremely grateful for this at a critical time in the project, we knew that this model, and the funding itself, was going to only be a short-term interim measure. We have experimented with different ways to generate revenue ourselves, such as by accepting contracts (or sponsors) for specific features, such as platform support and FIPS. While these are helpful, they didn’t lead to reliable sustainable revenue.”

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Precious Plastics is a circular economy proponent. They work on problems of plastic recycling, building open hardware designs for the recycling machines and communities:

Precious Plastics is lead by Dave Hakkens (of Project Phonebloks fame). The project has been running for many years, and many of their machines are deployed in India too. I have suggested them to apply to FLOSS/fund. If FLOSS/fund think it’s worthwhile, they can be contacted directly also (from the same page above):

If you can make a large donation, it would be the biggest support we could receive right now. This help would allow us to stay on track in the short term, enabling us to focus on long-term goals. Our aim is to become independent of donors and self-sustaining. Additionally, your contribution could be tax-deductible as we are a Non-Profit (ANBI) from the Netherlands.
Our 3 year vision is to triple the impact of small-scale plastic recycling globally by releasing Version 5 with a total budget of 2.1 million euros.

If you’re interested, send us an email to hello@preciousplastic.com

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It might be worth looking into projects hosted by Open Collective.

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I’ll mention XZ Utils here. This is an example of a project that seemingly can’t get funds due to complications with Finnish law (see edit below). They are saying that they can get funds only in exchange for services rendered (e.g. maintenance contract, services, etc but no crowdfunding, no donations as they are not an “org”). See Enable sponsorship on your repo · Issue #105 · tukaani-project/xz · GitHub . I have suggested FLOSS/fund to them a while ago, but didn’t see any response.

EDIT: The maintainer has replied on the github issue. Looks like the legal thing is only related to soliciting funds from the general public. May not apply to grants. Maintainer hadn’t heard of FLOSS/fund. He is considering his available options, including sovereign tech fund.

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https://krita.org is a FOSS painting program.
Until 2022, the project was getting considerable donations (they even had Intel as a corporate sponsor!) but the number has now plummeted down to ~3k USD per month (which is barely a FT dev’s salary).

I’m pretty sure a good number of art and gaming studious are using Krita now, yet the number of corporate sponsors remains zero. Donations go primary towards development, hardware and support.

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https://inkscape.org/ is another FOSS design tool.

Again, no corporate sponsors (except for some infra sponsorships) - Sponsors | Inkscape

I wasn’t able to find any info on the current finances situation, but it looks like they don’t get a lot of donations.

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ImageMagick is a FOSS suite, used for editing and manipulating digital images. It has been available for free since the early 1990’s and has consistently been one of the most comprehensive free image processing packages available. For a long time, the developers were running the project out of their own pockets, but are now in need of donations. The creator has a full time job and only works on the project in his spare time.

The package is certainly critical and by all means prone to vulnerabilities.
ImageMagick is used by millions of websites and applications, including popular CMS like WordPress and Drupal.

I was not able to find much info the funding, except the fact that they remain at 4% of their monthly sponsors goal

For those who don’t know, ImageMagick is believed to be the project being referred to in XKCD 2347 :smile:

ImageMagick, mentioned in the title text, is a popular, standalone utility released in 1990 that is used for performing transformations between various graphics file formats, and various other transformations. While there are also numerous libraries and APIs for performing these tasks within larger programs, ImageMagick is so popular and easy to use that many programs use its API or just find it easier to shell out to ImageMagick to perform a necessary transformation. They therefore depend on ImageMagick, and would break if ImageMagick were to disappear.

Some projects make money by proving support which isn’t the case for ImageMagick (ImageMagick Commercial Support · ImageMagick/ImageMagick · Discussion #5744 · GitHub),
hence it really solely relies on donations.

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[Not a project]
Software Freedom Conservancy, which acts as a fiscal host for many projects (including Inkscape) and also runs the popular Outreachy program is currently looking for donors -

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Some of us reached out to the above projects and we’ve received positive responses.

Krita has now applied for FLOSS/fund, and OpenSSL,NTP and XZ tools are going to be applying soon!

That goes on to show that a good number of critical projects are unaware about these programs, and the community can be of immense help in spreading awareness. If you can think of any project that is in need of funding, please try to reach out to them or just list them here and someone will volunteer to do so.

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I’ve been a lichess user for over 5 years now, and it’s one of my favorite open source projects (and the first one I ever donated to)

lichess.org is a free/libre, open-source chess server powered by volunteers and donations.

Today, Lichess users play more than five million games every day. Lichess is one of the most popular chess websites in the world while remaining 100% free. Most “free” websites subsist by selling ads or selling user data. Others do it by putting all the good stuff behind paywalls. Lichess does none of these things and never will. With no investors demanding profits, Lichess staff can focus on improving the site as their only goal.

The platform is truly free (as in freedom and free beer - Lichess features • lichess.org) and is maintained by a very small team (2 if I’m not wrong) of developers who work on it full-time.

Donations go towards the servers and to pay the developers. All their expenses are also public.

Other links -

Press kit
Github
Donations page

P.S -I don’t think this is a critical and/or underfunded project, but I felt it’s worth a mention here. Naturally any additional support to the project helps them add more features, hire devs etc.

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:tada:

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libjpeg-turbo is a high-performance JPEG image compression/decompression software, used across browsers, devices, and operating systems.

libjpeg-turbo is one of the few pieces of critical IT infrastructure that is sustained solely through patronage and funded development. However, this often requires a delicate balancing act: keeping the project moving forward so it can remain relevant, remain responsive to the user community, and provide a timely return on investment for funded development sponsors, while also keeping the project moving forward in a way that doesn’t require the maintainer to eat labor cost or borrow against expected future funding (which sometimes doesn’t arrive) in order to finish a strategically important feature or release. Developing libjpeg-turbo independently ensures that it can remain community-focused and free of any one organization’s agenda, but it also requires continuous funding, which has historically not been easy to secure.

All sponsorship money goes directly toward funding the labor necessary to maintain libjpeg-turbo, support the user community, and implement bug fixes and strategically important features.

Here is a list of issues that currently require funding -Issues · libjpeg-turbo/libjpeg-turbo · GitHub

They get sponsors every now and then but this doesn’t look like regular funding - libjpeg-turbo | About / Sponsors that devs can rely on

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dnsmasq is used in millions of devices as a lightweight DNS and DHCP server that lets you tinker around without having to install a full-blown DNS server.

Dnsmasq is mainly written and maintained by Simon Kelley. For most of its life, dnsmasq has been a spare-time project. These days I’m working on it as my main activity. I don’t have an employer or anyone who pays me regularly to work on dnsmasq. If you’d like to make a contribution towards my expenses, please use the donation button below.

It recently won the Bluehats prize which is an initiative by the french government.

It’s one of those humble dependencies that you’ll find pretty much everywhere- routers, Operating Systems, personal projects and vending machines (that have routers in them) :smiley:

Check out their podcast episode on FLOSS weekly

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Here are the other winners of the Bluehat prizes

https://nlnet.nl/bluehatsprize/2024/

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chrony is a versatile (and one the most secure, as per a CII audit) implementation of NTP. It can synchronise the system clock with NTP servers, reference clocks (e.g. GPS receiver), and manual input using wristwatch and keyboard.

It was originally written by Richard Curnow. and is currently maintained and developed by Miroslav Lichvar. The project is definitely very critical and important, but is not currently looking for donations (as per a recent forum thread).

They (sovereign tech fund) know that chrony exists and have asked me if funding is needed. Currently it is not. I’m still employed by Red Hat and have time to work on chrony. I think the project is in a good shape. Rate of bugs is low and new features are still developed (slowly but there is a progress). Testing and fuzzing coverage is good.

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Rethink DNS is a FOSS DNS resolver that helps make the internet a safer and more transparent place.

The project, which has also received grants from Mozilla (as part of the Builders MVP Program) and OSOM Privacy Inc., has been operational since August 2020. Over the last year, Rethink DNS has become increasingly popular in regions like Iran, Turkmenistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the US, Germany, and Hong Kong and has over 5,00,000 downloads on Play Store. This growing user base has led to a surge in traffic that has increased the project’s infrastructure costs significantly. Until now, the two full-time developers behind Rethink DNS had been covering these expenses personally.

Please note that FOSS United recently gave them a follow-on grant. However this is a very small grant and the project should get more community support. Their monthly costs are around 1000$

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