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We just gave a million dollars to Open Source maintainers
The title is not a joke. For those of you who know Sentry, you know we’ve been giving back to Open Source maintainers since our early days in whatever ways we could. But around five years ago we really started to give in a more meaningful way. This year we increased our budget from $750,000 to $1,000,000.
Why? Well, we know the obvious value of Open Source software and believe the companies who use it should support the people who build and maintain it. Open Source software is like the ultimate cheat code – shared libraries, frameworks, and tools that have years of community support and development that we can use off the shelf and focus time on building other products, services, and businesses. Sentry benefits from this every day. Funding these projects and maintainers keeps the flywheel going.
LLMs have extended what we can build with these tools. But the AI stack also depends on Open Source. That’s one reason why we added NumFOCUS to the foundations we supported in 2025 and continue to support this year too. (The more you know: NumFOCUS is a nonprofit that helps fund the Open Source scientific computing tools used in today’s AI development.)
The Open Source Pledge
All this said, Sentry is not alone. This October marks the second anniversary of the Open Source Pledge, an initiative we started to help recognize companies who felt the same way we did and highlight Open Source maintainers. As of today, the Pledge’s 37 member companies have paid a total of $7,421,535 to Open Source maintainers and foundations.
We also started the Open Source Pledge because, to put it bluntly, we don’t believe in freeloading. Here’s a little PSA on why you should join the Pledge.
Just two months ago in August, the Python Software Foundation (PSF) shared that its AWS spend had increased by ~69% from July of previous year. This shouldn’t be a surprise to us because our prompt-engineered applications are driving more Python development, agents are installing packages, and more CI runs are all contributing to the demand on registries. The PSF also highlighted the need for more funding to grow the team operating this infrastructure.
Our ask: Consider giving back and join the Open Source Pledge, it’s easy.
How did we distribute the $1,000,000?
We sent $495,000 to thanks.dev for them to distribute to hundreds of maintainers whose packages we use. Here’s a table of recipients, updated as more maintainers accept our sponsorships. thanks.dev makes the process of funding dependencies simple, from scanning your dependency tree to handling the actual payments. This means there’s no excuse to not pay maintainers, so your company should sign up to thanks.dev, too.
Then we used ecosyste.ms Funds to give $100,000 to globally critical packages across the Python, Django, Ruby, Rust, JS and Go ecosystems.
We’ve been keeping up to date with software supply chain research, so we know that the dependency trees provided by package managers have important blind spots: so-called phantom dependencies. To support all the maintainers we depend on, even those that are hard to find, we partnered with researchers from the Software Stewardship Lab to identify and pay dozens of Sentry dependencies that regular dependency analyses completely miss.
Of course, we’re supporting Open Source foundations, too.
| Name | Amount |
|---|---|
| Python Software Foundation | $60,000 |
| PHP Foundation | $45,000 |
| Ruby Central | $40,000 |
| Django Software Foundation | $40,000 |
| Packagist | $35,000 |
| Open Source Initiative | $30,000 |
| Rust Foundation | $15,000 |
| Geomys | $15,000 |
| OpenJS Foundation | $10,000 |
| NumFOCUS | $10,000 |
| Alpine Linux | $5,000 |
And the Syntax team also spent $100,000 of our budget to sponsor the following projects:
| Name | Amount |
|---|---|
| antirez (maintainer of dwarfstar) | $5,000 |
| biomejs | $5,000 |
| coolLabs | $5,000 |
| davidkpiano (maintainer of XState) | $5,000 |
| dmno-dev (maintainer of varlock) | $5,000 |
| donmccurdy (maintainer of Three.js) | $1,250 |
| FFmpeg | $5,000 |
| FLOSSAfrica Pool | $5,000 |
| FreeCAD | $5,000 |
| gnachman (maintainer of iTerm2) | $5,000 |
| Jellyfin | $5,000 |
| mholt (maintainer of Caddy) | $5,000 |
| mrdoob (maintainer of Three.js) | $1,250 |
| mswjs | $5,000 |
| OBS | $5,000 |
| pnpm | $5,000 |
| Software Stewardship Lab’s Burnout in Open Source Fund | $5,000 |
| tannerlinsley (maintainer of TanStack) | $5,000 |
| Tinchox5 (maintainer of SnapDOM) | $5,000 |
| Vanilagy (maintainer of Mediabunny) | $5,000 |
| webpro (maintainer of knip.dev) | $5,000 |
| WestLangley (maintainer of Three.js) | $2,500 |
A big thank you to all you Open Source maintainers. We appreciate your work!
