For nearly a decade, Open Collective has served as the financial and legal infrastructure for over 3,000 open source projects, managing millions in funding. However, for much of that history, the platform itself was owned by Venture Capitalists a tension that sits at the heart of the FOSS funding conversation.
In this talk, we reveal how the platform’s largest users, specifically the Open Source Collective—orchestrated a coup to boot out the initial investors and restructure the entity into a 501(c)(6) membership non-profit - Open Finance Consortium (https://oficonsortium.org/). This is a case study in "Exit to Community" (E2C), demonstrating a radical alternative to the traditional startup exit that often threatens FOSS sustainability. https://blog.opencollective.com/the-open-collective-platform-is-moving-to-a-community-governed-non-profit/
We will move beyond the celebration of the acquisition to discuss the hard realities that followed. It is one thing to "free" a platform; it is another to sustain it. We will explore:
The Negotiation: How a Fiscal Host leveraged its position to facilitate a transition from private equity to community ownership.
Governance vs. Reality: The evolution of our shared governance model and the difficulty of putting democratic ideals into practice while running a complex tech stack.
The Financials: The transparent challenges of achieving financial sustainability without the cushion of VC cash flow, and what was sacrificed in the process.
This session is for maintainers, funders, and policymakers interested in the structural future of FOSS infrastructure. We offer not just a success story, but a candid look at the friction involved in building a technology platform that is truly owned by the ecosystem it serves.
Free software has no shortage of talent, ideas, or users, but it does have a funding problem. The largest potential funding source already exists: public procurement. Governments spend billions each year on software and digital services, but most of that money flows into proprietary silos that limit transparency, reuse, and sovereignty.
If we take “Public Money, Public Code” - https://publiccode.eu - seriously, we must recognize that procurement (not donations or sponsorships) is the most powerful lever to sustain open source. Every government contract is a potential long-term investment in the commons.
This talk examines how procurement practices can become the backbone of sustainable free software ecosystems: • Why procurement reform is essential to digital sovereignty. • How existing frameworks (e.g., the EU Open Source Strategy - https://commission.europa.eu/about/departments-and-executive-agencies/digital-services/open-source-software-strategy_en ) still fall short. • How to structure tenders, contracts, and governance to ensure open deliverables. • Why governments should stop “buying software” and start funding maintenance and collaboration. • The opportunity for community organizations and small firms to compete fairly.
Procurement is where ideals meet infrastructure. By redirecting even a small fraction of public IT budgets toward open, reusable solutions, we can achieve what years of advocacy and fundraising have not: a self-sustaining free software ecosystem that serves everyone.
This talk is a call-to-action to join our campaign to convince the European Union that, in order to secure its digital future, it should invest in open source maintenance via an EU Sovereign Tech Fund (EU-STF).
Right now, the EU is negotiating its multi-year budget for the period of 2028-2034. Traditionally, the EU budget has been focused on regional development and agriculture, but more and more policymakers are realizing that investment in our digital infrastructure is just as important as maintaining physical roads and bridges. Last year at FOSDEM, we discussed with you what an EU fund for open source maintenance should look like. A lot has happened since then: We have conducted an in-depth study into the political, legal and economic feasibility of an EU-STF, building on the successful example of the German Sovereign Tech Agency. We assembled a coalition of supporters from industry and civil society, and we have presented our proposal to the European Parliament and Member States.
Now it’s time to take the campaign to the next level and we need your support to make it happen. The goal of this session is to present the findings of the feasibility study for the EU-STF and demonstrate why mission-driven investment, coordinated by the public sector, is important for the diversification of Europe’s funding landscape. It will demonstrate concretely how such a proposal can directly improve the sustainability and health of the open source community globally, and why this is so important for Europe in achieving its digital future.
This is a session combining the experience of several FOSS projects in their funding journey. Each will have 10 minutes to present, after which a Q&A session will happen.
The presenting FOSS projects will be:
The Domain Name System (DNS) is one of the core pillars of the internet, enabling users to navigate the web reliably and securely. However, underfunded open source DNS projects create systemic risks, exposing millions of users to vulnerabilities and threatening the stability and security of the entire internet.
The Nominet DNS Fund aims to tackle these critical gaps by investing in the security, resilience, and long-term viability of these essential open source components, recognising that a robust and secure DNS is fundamental to the internet’s continued operation and the public benefit it provides. Having completed our first round of funding in 2025 and with a view to extending in 2026, this session will share highlights including: RESEARCH Reflections on revisiting research conducted by Demos that led us to create the fund PILOT AND LEARN Analyse some key learning about implementing the fund, including surprises and challenges we face moving forward *ITERATE Seek feedback from the devroom in an interactive session to reflect on the fund and shape its future direction.
We aim to share learning and future direction in open dialogue with the devroom and have ideas about what devroom participants will get out of the session: Practical Knowledge: Participants will come away with insight from a real case study of funding OS and delve into some of the learning and challenges Conversation points: asking questions such as: How do we better align what's being funded with what's needed? What are the opportunities for better dialogue, feedback and listening? How can applications for funding be more inclusive and accessible?
This talk, based on a paper in Open Research Europe, will discuss the current state of research software funding, propose a way of thinking about the different models that are currently used, and suggest new models to better support the global research software community.
Today, research software funding operates across a disconnected landscape of public and private grant-making organizations, leading to inefficiencies for software projects and the broader research community. The lack of coordination forces projects to pursue multiple, often overlapping opportunities, and forces funders to independently evaluate projects and proposals, resulting in duplicated effort and suboptimal resource distribution.
By examining existing collaboration models, including centralized and distributed approaches, we highlight how joint decision-making mechanisms could improve sustainability for reusable software resources. An international set of examples illustrates how cross-organization cooperation for research software funding can be structured. Such collaborations can optimize grant disbursement and align priorities. Increased collaboration could allow funders to better address the ongoing maintenance and evolution of research software, lowering barriers that hamper discovery across multiple research domains. Encouraging both bottom-up user-driven and top-down coordination mechanisms ultimately supports more robust, widely accessible research software, improving global research outcomes.
The open source funding landscape is changing. Funders struggle to effectively measure and communicate the impact of their programs beyond case-by-case stories. This disconnect threatens the long-term sustainability of funding and thus the sustainability of FOSS. We spent the last year talking with FOSS funding organizations and grant recipients to understand their approach to grant funding, impact reporting, and FOSS sustainability. We also sought to understand the disconnect between the needs of FOSS projects and what funders can provide.
In this talk, we share early insights from our interviews. We will share current funder challenges, like differentiating between reactive vs. proactive impact reporting and translating technical outcomes into policy-maker language. Interestingly, we’re are hosting a workshop here at FOSDEM with FOSS funders to co-design on a shared Funding Impact Taxonomy and Measurement Guidelines co-designed. We will share with the audience the the latest learnings and offer a space for further discussion. We may not bring any solutions but we will advance the dialog, so that funders and FOSS projects can better understand each other.
As an OSS developer, finding funding is probably the least inspiring high-priority activity on your list of things to do. This session will present concrete steps for the funding task you already have. These will become the tools to find the funding you need. As the Director of Operations at the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation and Chair of the Sponsorship Working Group, I'm both a seeker of funding and a reviewer of funding requests. There are no secret handshakes or tricks here, just connecting dots to create a purpose and roadmap that will help. I will cover content you can create to help inform potential sponsors, how to approach them, and the fiscal efficiency of funding methods. The information is based on my own experience working with sponsors and projects, so it is not theoretical but also far from universal or complete.
Funding remains one of the biggest challenges in sustaining free and open source software. In this interactive workshop, we will use the results of a global survey and interview series start a conversation around how developers, users and maintainers think about money in FOSS and what it means for the future of our ecosystem. During the session we will explore donation campaign best practices from FOSS projects, discuss the role transparency and clear policies play in how funds are handled, and give participants an opportunity to learn, contribute, connect and explore how we can help make FOSS more sustainable.
Open source foundations face growing demands, more projects, more users, more scrutiny, while still relying on fragile funding models built around grants, sponsorships, and donations. This talk argues that the problem is not funding open source projects, but funding them in isolation.
Drawing on experiences from the Apereo and the eBPF Foundations, this session explores a shift from project-centric funding to ecosystem-level investment. Using eBPF as a case study, it shows how funding efforts like security audits, upstream kernel work, directed development, face-to-face collaboration, and ecosystem marketing can strengthen many projects at once and deliver far greater impact per dollar.
The talk also introduces Apereo's self-sustainability model, in which foundations, even projects, support themselves through services rooted in community expertise, such as training, events, audits, and operational support, rather than perpetual fundraising. The goal is not to create more foundations, but ones more focused on ecosystems that are resilient by design, and able to support open source as shared infrastructure rather than a collection of individual projects.
Merged session combining two lightning talks and Q&A. The two talks are: - "Funding a FOSS Revolution in the Energy Sector" by Maximilian Perzen - "An Enterprise Perspective on Open Source Funding" by Tobias Gabriel and Fabian Palmer
In a wide array of funding and investment directed at open source, enterprise and venture capital funding rarely gets an important slot in European discussions.
However, as shown in our recent "State of Commercial Open Source" research report of ~800 VC-backed commercial open source (COSS) companies, the virtuous cycle created by enterprise contributions and VC funding not only improves upstream open source projects across virtually every metric but drives thriving commercial ecosystems creating tangible economic and societal value.
The data is clear: while public funding (so far) often functions as early-stage seed capital or a safety net for critical projects, research shows enterprises contributing over $7.7B annually in funding and paid developer time to open source on a global basis. Furthermore there is a big promise in VC funding for open source, also in Europe, with the number and value of transactions rising in recent years, with $26.4B invested in 2024 and strong investment performance indicators.
As vertical sectors like finance, energy, telco, and agriculture increasingly embrace open source as a pillar of their digital transformation, it’s clear that commercial open source has become a superior venture model and a strategic opportunity for Europe, but one that requires engaging diverse stakeholders and mutual education on the opportunities at hand.
In this talk we will share Linux Foundation Europe’s experience of building (and balancing) some of the largest global open source ecosystems as well as Commit’s unique perspective as the first fund solely focused on commercial open source investments in Europe.