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Small, Crucial OSS Teams Could Use a Suit

Yesterday, Phil Dini asked, “What if all modern open source was a ZIRP [(Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon)1]?”

It’s an interesting question. Cheap cash and less scrupulous investors helped fuel giant R&D budgets at FAANG companies and beyond (Uber, Square, and Stripe also come to mind), which led to entire teams at these organizations driving open source projects. Following rising rates and a vibe-shift in investor expectations, these companies started to cut projects and people that couldn’t easily be tied to revenue. Including, in many cases, OSS teams.

Did these cuts doom contemporary open source?

The Federal Funds Effective Rate

One rebuttal is that the technical corners of the internet are always worried about OSS funding. A major conversation about OSS funding occurred in 2014 – smack amid ZIRP – during the Heartbleed fiasco, when a major bug was found within OpenSSL.

“The Internet Is Being Protected By Two Guys Named Steve”, BuzzFeed News famously wrote, as the OSS funding conversation briefly bubbled up towards the mainstream. Crucial yet understaffed OSS projects stumbling and causing chaos is a depressingly common story, regardless of rates.

Considering Phil’s question, I remembered a 2016 post by the researcher Nadia Asparouhova. In her post, Nadia writes that open source infrastructure – specifically, “all the tools that help developers build software” – is “the internet’s biggest blind spot,” before touching on stories like the ones above. Nadia enumerated the state of OSS funding in 2016 rather well:

  1. Red Hat is doing great. (But nobody believes there will ever be another Red Hat.)
  2. Projects that are effectively “sponsored” by a company, like Go/Google, or React/Facebook, are doing fine. (But many projects are not so lucky.)
  3. A lot of companies make their software open source as a “loss leader” to kill a competitor, drive an audience to paid products, or build brand and community. (But these aren’t infrastructure projects.)
  4. VCs have poured money into a couple of open source infrastructure companies, like Docker or Meteor. (But these are the exception, not the rule, as Sam Gerstenzang recently explained.)
  5. A couple of really big projects, like Linux, are well funded even without a business model. (But Linux is as much of an outlier as Red Hat.)

Fast-forward to now, with the effective rate ~5% higher, and not much has changed! Sure, we’ve seen cuts in the 2nd category above and VC investment in general has slowed – but it’s easy to think about examples in both buckets, especially related to AI and data infrastructure. Meta did make big cuts, but it’s funding open source AI projects with comical budgets. OSS data tooling is being funded decently too, with DataBrick’s Unity Catalog and MotherDuck being examples of Nadia’s 2nd and 4th categories.

This is a 2nd potential answer to Phil’s question: attention is now on data and AI infrastructure, not the web, and the OSS funding has followed.

I’m still chewing on the question, but not limiting it to ZIRP. Revisiting Nadia’s 2016 piece reminds me this is a constant discussion, one we haven’t cracked. Small, crucial, but unsexy projects are critical foundations enabling so many products – and yet they remain unfunded. They lack the marketing, business development, and legal resources needed to hunt down funding from sponsors.

More and more I believe we need to pursue the agency model. We need a CAA or Endeavor for nerds. Teams who can hunt down speaking opportunities, training, publishing, and consulting opportunities that fit within OSS devs’ schedules. Teams that understand why OSS devs do what they do, and find ways to keep them focused on the problems they love. Behind the scenes, this is a big chunk of The Linux Foundation’s function, but for giant projects. We need an Ari Emanuel for individual developers.

One of the reasons I keep coming back to the agency model when people talk about OSS budgets is because I think small OSS development is like writing, painting, playing music, or other fields where lots of people want to do it. Coding is a form of human expression. It is thoughts made solid and communicable to others. A developer’s opinions and values are embedded in their code. Like other forms of human expression, the act is compulsory for many.

Every evening, somewhere, a developer bored with her day job starts a new CMS.

And like the rest of the art-based businesses, we need people to handle the logistics that enable the most essential projects to continue and thrive. And that’s probably an agency model.

Have thoughts? Send me a note

  1. “ZIRP” stands for “Zero Interest Rate Policy” or, less often, “Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon”, which is a thing that flourished when money when money was cheap thanks to 0% inteerst rates set by the Federal Reserve. I’m assuming Phil meant the latter. ↩