Funding Open Source for Digital Sovereignty

[Dries Buytaert]

Vital thoughts from Drupal founder Dries Buytaert on how, if Europeans and others are going to rely on open source software as a way to decouple from US services, funding the people and communities that build open source software must be part of the conversation:

“Open Source is the most credible path to digital sovereignty. It's the only software you can run without permission. You can audit, host, modify, and migrate it yourself. No vendor, no government, and no sanctions regime can ever take it away.

But there is a catch. When governments buy Open Source services, the money rarely reaches the people who actually build and maintain it. Procurement rules favor large system integrators, not the maintainers of the software itself. As a result, public money flows to companies that package and resell Open Source, not to the ones who do the hard work of writing and sustaining it.”

Dries’s solution involves evaluating a company’s open source contributions as part of a procurement process. If governments and other organizations are willing to do this in practice, that would work, at least for certain kinds of maintainers and communities. It would favor the companies that give back to an open source project over the ones that just repackage someone else’s work, and in doing so, make it more attractive for companies to give back in the first place.

But I think there’s another way to look at the problem: provide the tools, infrastructure, and platforms for maintainers to start companies around their work. Rather than encouraging existing companies to become open source participants, this would encourage open source participants to become companies. It might even incentivize new kinds of companies to be drawn up as co-operatives of open source maintainers.

When a company obtains software, it’s looking for more than the code: it needs a solution to a problem. Services address organizational problems more directly than codebases alone. There’s a reason why Dries’s Acquia and Matt Mullenweg’s Automattic have become so successful.

There is nothing unethical about creating services businesses (or non-profits with service missions) that are aligned with the open source nature of their underlying products — and, indeed, that direct connection with customers will make those products better. But I’d say that most open source maintainers either aren’t thinking that way or are daunted by the prospect. So perhaps they could use a little help?

An open source services in a box solution for these maintainers — including business fundamentals, sales and marketing, and a kind of operating system for running a small company around open source — could be an interesting way to both make open source software more palatable for institutional buyers and bring more money into their ecosystems.

Code, generally speaking, is not a solution in itself, but it can be part of one. This would fill in the rest.

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