About

Ecosystem Funds sets out to solve the issues of today’s open source funding services

Deep dependencies are hidden below the waterline

Deep dependencies are not receiving financial support

The vast majority of funding today goes to projects that developers make an active decision to include in their work. Meanwhile thousands of open source communities that form the foundation on which much of the world’s software runs receive nothing.

Competitive funding creates more losers than winners

Most funding solutions behave like competitive marketplaces

Projects compete for resources (money, attention, contribution) and the projects with the exposure, notable leaders or success are the winners. While this is great for funding future focused projects, it doesn’t solve the problem of funding the unseen infrastructure that lies below the waterline. To do this we must to adjust our perspective:

We need to fund projects based on what we use rather than what we see

Ecosystem Funds is a collaboration

ecosyste.ms

Open Source Intelligence for developers, researchers & policymakers.

ecosyste.ms was developed in 2022 with financial support from Schmidt Futures and Open Source Collective. ecosyste.ms is a set of free services and tools for developers, researchers and policymakers to help identify, secure and sustain open source software.

Open Source Collective

Working for the common interests of those who create and use open source software.

Open Source Collective is one of the largest fiscal sponsor organizations in the world, acting as the legal and financial home to thousands of open source project communities. We accept millions on behalf of our member projects, who use their money to maintain and develop open source software.