Private Packagist is joining the Open Source Pledge

We're joining the Open Source Pledge because our business is built on and with open-source software. We will spend at least $2,000 per full-time developer on open-source projects and maintainers. Sentry launched this initiative after a $500,000 distribution across their open-source dependencies, and others followed.

Sustainability of open-source projects has been an ongoing discussion subject for decades now with a great many ideas and projects trying to "solve" issues around it, a lot of which failed, or didn't have a big impact. There's a great write-up of the state of open-source sponsoring by Scott Chacon over at GitButler which matches a lot of our thoughts on the subject. This pledge won't be the answer to open source sustainability, but if we manage to get a lot of companies on board it can have a major impact.

Private Packagist was built with the very idea in mind of finding a business model to sustain developing the Composer open-source project. While it took us a few years, it is working. So, of course, we spend plenty of time and money on our own open-source project Composer, but we're not going to include this here. Instead we'll focus on what we to do sustain the ecosystem around us: the tools we work with and build on top of.

We've contributed a total of $26,528 to open source projects and maintainers in 2023 and are on track to spend the same or more in 2024, so at an average of 4 full-time employees over the course of 2023, that's $6,632/FTE, well above the pledge requirement of $2,000/employee.

In 2023 we gave to:

Do you rely on open source software? You probably do! Ask your company to join the pledge too! And if you work with PHP, you should really start sponsoring the PHP Foundation!