At Spotify, we believe that every company must play a role and do their part to help sustain the future of open source. For our part, we think it should come from three important investments that all play into the same stream of making OSS sustainable. These are:
1.Funding Open Source with money
2.Funding Open Source with time
3.Establishing Open Source business models
With our FOSS fund we fund open source projects we depend on with money, with no strings attached.
For our internal projects we measure amount of work done within working hours and set strict guidelines for our leaders to dedicate time to open source, to ensure everyone can participate in open source, not just the small group of people willing to invest evenings and weekends.
In 2020 we launched Backstage and donated it to CNCF and are now creating a commercial ecosystem around it, to show a third path towards sustainable open source through creating an open source business model.
Based on these 3 models, this session will showcase our concrete strategies and initiatives inside Spotify to drive an increase in oss sustainability, which we believe will also have a positive impact on the diversity and in return reduce our strategic risks of adopting open source projects.
