Supporting open-source projects with Open Collective

An open-source project is a project whose source code is made freely available and which can be modified and redistributed (under the same license as the original project).

Note that the notions of open-source and free software are two different things, here's an article by Richard Stallman to learn more.

An open-source piece of software can be published by a company, an association or an individual and sometimes requires financial resources in order to be maintained, whether for development, infrastructure, etc...

Some companies manage to make these projects profitable by setting up paid support, but this isn't the case for all projects, and some open-source software can become financial black holes, even though they are used by large companies and millions of developers around the world.

This is why more and more open-source projects are turning to donations and sponsors to survive and continue to evolve the project.

Open Collective

Open Collective is a platform that allows (among other things) open-source projects to collect donations (regardless of the amount) but also to get sponsored by other organizations, companies, etc...

In addition to being a donation-collecting platform, Open Collective also allows you to:

• Manage the administrative and tax side of things
• Maintain a budget that is transparent to the community

And the icing on the cake, Open Collective is itself an open-source project! All the code repositories are available on Github at the following address: https://github.com/opencollective

Whether you want to personally support a few projects, or your company wants to sponsor a technology it uses, it's THE ideal platform.

Note that Open Collective also makes it possible to fund events such as meetups, conferences and more!

A few projects

Here's a short list of major tech projects funded by the Open Collective community: