Canonical, the company behind one of the most popular Linux distros, Ubuntu, announced a new initiative to financially support smaller open source projects through a collaboration with thanks.dev.
This is the perfect moment to express my hope that other companies will follow their lead. It’s a move that truly deserves admiration—ensuring real funding reaches the countless open-source developers who generously give their time and efforts so that millions of people and businesses can benefit at no cost.
Now, what exactly is thanks.dev? It’s a new innovative platform (somewhere between a funding router and a dependency analytics tool) aimed at making open-source work financially sustainable for the long tail of small projects that large companies consume daily.
In other words, thanks.dev helps developers get real money from the companies that depend on them. It analyzes GitHub repositories to identify and allocate donations based on the dependencies projects rely on. Its main advantages are:
- Zero-friction micro-donations: You don’t have to figure out who to sponsor or keep hundreds of payment profiles. Thanks.dev handles that mechanically.
- Fair, long-tail distribution: Even tiny but critical libraries see funds instead of only the “celebrity” projects.
Over the next 12 months, Canonical has committed to donating $120,000 to open source developers, disbursed monthly in $10,000 installments. Thanks.dev’s algorithm distributes these funds according to dependency usage across projects, considering dependency trees up to three levels deep.
This means the more widely used a dependency is, the greater its share of the donation pool. Canonical has fine-tuned the allocation to reflect its usage patterns, adjusting weights by programming language and GitHub organization to ensure a fair distribution.
Top recipients include:
- gh/pallets: Developers of the Werkzeug and Jinja2 libraries, foundational to web frameworks like Flask.
- gh/sphinx-doc: Creators of Sphinx, the documentation generator widely used in Python projects.
- gh/pyston: Contributors to Pyston, an optimized Python implementation.
- gh/psf: The Python Software Foundation, supporting Python’s development and community.
- gh/pytest-dev: Maintainers of pytest, a popular testing framework in the Python ecosystem.
- gh/nedbat: Ned Batchelder, author of coverage.py, a tool extensively used in Canonical’s testing.
- gh/adamchainz: Adam Johnson, creator of time-machine, utilized in the Ubuntu website.
The full list of recipients, which already numbers over 300 developers and organizations, is publicly available here. For more information, see Canonical’s announcement.
Great, and I fully agree! It will benefit the whole if the other companies also contribute to the open-source developers!
And it is an excellent idea: funding the small but fair, long-tail projects!