One year ago, we started an experiment about funding open source software with the following question:

If you had 100 money, how would you distribute it across the entire open source ecosystem?

Each month, we select three open source projects from the Open Collective platform, calculate their scores using the Criticality Score tool, and distribute that month’s amount among them based on those scores.

Our goal is to spark more in-depth discussions about the use of public money to fund the open source ecosystem, how the ‘Agile Public Fund’ should work, and to engage with our open source entrepreneurs.

Here are some quick stats about the last twelve months:

• Including the test run, we invested $2646 in 39 open-source collectives, with one failed payment.
• The project with the highest score is Zulip, a team chat application, with a score of 0.7932.
• The project with the highest estimated annual budget is Qubes OS, a security-focused operating system, which is well above the average at approximately $43K.
• After the first six months, the average estimated annual budget across all projects was $3667. After a year, that’s now down to $2425. Not even close to an average salary for a single month, let alone a year.
• Fifteen projects had no prior donations on Open Collective; we were the first to donate.
• The most used license is MIT, with 17 projects.

As a side “marketing” experiment, we used the followers of our personal Twitter account to determine the monthly amount. We have gained ~45 new followers over the past year. Although our efforts are relatively passive, the experiment hasn’t significantly affected our audience growth so far. We will include LinkedIn and Mastodon accounts in future rounds.

We hope to add extra details to the project list and see whether we can improve the Criticality Score. As usual, your feedback is priceless, so please don’t hesitate!