Join the Pledge
Today we officially launch the Open Source Pledge.
The Pledge started as an idea some years back: what if we could give back to Open Source on behalf of every employee at Sentry? We threw around a number of ideas on how we might do that, but none of them seemed like they’d achieve the level of impact we wanted. We always had two core goals with it:
- Pay maintainers, directly.
- Do it sustainably, and scale it with our growth.
My earliest thought in this space centered around a form of donation matching. The hope was we could take something like GitHub Sponsors and match employees’ contributions to Open Source maintainers. That posed a number of challenges, but the biggest risk was participation. Not everyone cares about Open Source (that’s fine!), so donation matching breaks down with reduced participation. Instead, we decided to do direct funding, driven by a variety of inputs (our dependency graph, projects people voted on, and guidance from engineering leadership).
That program is what you’ve seen from us publicly, running it for three consecutive years. Each year we increased the funding amount based on Sentry’s own financial growth. It became such a no-brainer within Sentry’s leadership that we have aggressively increased the funding each year, even beyond our original targets. With the success of that, we set off to take that program, codify it, and bring it to other companies to see if we could turn this into a bigger thing.
Lead by Example
As we started talking about this, thinking about how we might turn it into something bigger with more impact, I was reminded of a number of scenarios that I had personally experienced when speaking with other founders. I regularly speak at a variety of events, many where Open Source is a key part of the narrative. They’re generally filled with venture-backed founders telling their story of why Open Source matters to their business, why they believe, and invest in it. One thing that was commonly expressed by these folks was the sustainability challenges in the industry. “Great!” I thought, “We have a solution!”
Not a single one of those founders did anything more than talk about the problem. Sure, maybe they throw a few bucks at one of the big foundations, and they almost certainly fund investments into their own ecosystem (their commercial interests). Unfortunately, they rarely do anything measurable that improves the thing they claim to care so deeply about. Worse, some of these people (often from the largest tech companies), have a laundry list of excuses for why giving money to people is hard.
So we decided to try and do something about it. That something is the Open Source Pledge. We don’t think it’s the only solution, nor do we think it’s the only way to give back, but we do believe giving cash money to maintainers is an appropriate way to show your thanks, to recognize their hard work, the value they create for you. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll do our small part in encouraging the maintainers to keep putting up with us in the enormous ecosystem we rely on.
How to Pledge
If you’ve made it this far, there are probably two questions you have.
First, what does it take to join the Pledge? You commit (with receipts) to giving 2,000 USD to your dependencies, per engineer you employ, every single year.
Sentry has ~135 engineers on staff, meaning our minimum commitment is $270,000 this year. Think about that in the context that Sentry generates more than $100mm in recurring revenue. It’s a fraction of what we spend in any given calendar month on digital advertising. It’s a pretty modest amount in the grand scheme of things, but it’s enough to have genuine impact.
Second, what’s the ROI your company gets from joining? It’s marketing. It’s your brand. It’s top-of-funnel. It’s software security. It’s free software. It’s open source.
We see ROI in two major ways: brand marketing, and the supply chain. You may care about one more than the other, so choose whichever helps you get over the finish line.
From the supply chain angle, you’re encouraging maintainers of the software you use to continue to provide support. You’re telling them that you value their work, and the contribution is there to encourage them to keep contributing to it. At the very least, you’re giving them a big thank you, setting the tone for future generations of maintainers. You’re thanking them for free software. Both of those improve the efficiency of your R&D investments.
From the brand angle, it’s what you make of it. If it’s a space you care about, you are putting your money where your mouth is, and your audience will recognize that. You buy products from brands that you connect with, and if your customers care about Open Source, you’re giving them one more reason to care about you over your competition. You’re also putting yourself out there, attracting new eyes to your brand that may not have heard about you before.
We don’t yet know if the Pledge will be successful, but I’m thrilled with the number of people who have decided to support the program (directly with funds, and indirectly with broadcasting and recruiting). I especially want to thank the people who have put in the hours to really get this off the ground: Chad Whitacre and Michael Selvidge from Sentry, as well as Vlad-Stefan Harbuz and Ethan Arrowood.
While Sentry is funding getting the program off the ground, we’re hoping it lasts well beyond us and turns into something much more. The industry is in a rocky place these days, and a little bit of effort from the people who can afford it can go a long way.
Learn more, including our list of amazing initial partners, at opensourcepledge.com.
