The Champion is a company that has chosen to champion an open source project and are investing significant resources into supporting it—maybe they have maintainers or committers on engineer staff or they have folks working directly with the community—but their core business doesn’t necessarily depend on this project for revenue.
That might sound strange. Why would a company pour engineering effort into something it doesn’t monetize?
The answer, almost always, is customers.
The factor profile
Where does the Champion sit on the four diagnostic factors?
Commercial dependency: Low to mid
The company has a solid business independent of this project—it’s not a direct revenue driver. That said, commercial dependency is typically a notch higher than the Adopter’s. The project may be strategically important to the company’s product or customer relationships, even if it’s not commercially critical in itself.
Project maturity: More established
Champions engage with mature projects that already have a community, governance, and opinions about how things should work. The project likely has an existing, healthy ecosystem—one that the Champion may already be participating in, or is deliberately choosing to invest in more deeply.
Ownership: Contributor or maintainer level
Champions see themselves as stewards. On the technical side, they’re not just users filing the occasional issue—they have people reviewing PRs, participating in governance, shaping project direction. They are investing in engineering resources to be involved in this project. But open source projects aren’t made from just technical work; a significant part of the work Champions do can come from supporting and growing the community.
Strategic intent: Customer confidence and/or ecosystem commitment
In many cases, the Champion—or at least their users—may already be part of this ecosystem. The intent isn’t to enter a new community cold, but to deepen existing ties. Their customers already rely on the project and want to see their vendor committed to it: integrating, contributing, and demonstrating that the engagement is genuine and long-term.
Why companies end up here
The Champion model is almost always driven by external influences. Your customers may already use and trust this open source project. Your users might want to know your product integrates seamlessly with it. They want to see you at the table—contributing, shaping direction, proving you’re serious about open standards.
It’s not altruism. It’s responding to what your market is telling you.
When your customers say “we want to use this project with your platform” and you show up as a genuine champion, that builds confidence that they can use the technologies they want to use and that you’ll support them. It tells them you’re invested in the ecosystem they already trust—not just your own walled garden.
Personal Aside The Champion model is the one I’m currently living at Snowflake with Apache Iceberg™. Our customers wanted open table formats. They wanted to know we were serious about the project’s direction and that their data wouldn’t be locked in. That customer demand is what drove our engagement in the beginning, and I’m proud to say that we’ve continued to deepen our relationships with the project and ecosystem our build our credibility in the space.
There’s also a quieter, more strategic motivation that Champions don’t always say out loud: growing contributor diversity in a project dilutes any single competitor’s dominance. A healthy, multi-company contributor base means no one organization controls the project’s roadmap. That’s good for the ecosystem—and it’s good for you.
But it’s worth saying clearly: the origin being customer-driven doesn’t have to make the engagement less genuine. Many Champions start from that external pressure and develop real investment in the project’s health over time. The key is that showing up with resources and participating in the community creates actual value, regardless of what motivated the decision to engage in the first place. Intent matters, but impact matters more.
Tactics: what the work actually looks like
The Champion’s playbook goes deeper than the Adopter’s. You’re not just sharing your experience—you’re actively shaping and growing the project.
Community leadership and growth. To show their commitment, the Champion has to go beyond just attending events. They need to show technical involvement, present their work in the project at community meetups or conferences, and show up in governance discussions and working groups. And it’s possible that they’re supporting the community in creating these spaces and making these events happen. But all of their work in and around the community needs to be built on a solid, technical foundation.
Project contributions and collaboration. This is where the Champion differs most from the Adopter. Their overall goal is to increase technical contributions to the project—writing code, conducting reviews, drafting documentation—and working with the other maintainers to further project as a whole. They are mentoring new contributors, mostly internally at first, to grow your company’s direct investment in the project. If they are not engaging directly through technical contributions, the Champion is generally working to grow the committer base of the project.
Financial support. Many Champions sponsor the project’s foundation or directly fund parts of the community. The same caveat from the Adopter post applies here, as well: money creates internal pressure to show ROI. Be aware of that dynamic. But for Champions, the financial support is often more natural because the strategic value is easier to articulate internally (”our customers demand this integration”) and they have already shown financial commitment by having engineers on payroll to contribute.
The key difference from the Adopter: Champions are building relationships; they are not just increasing their visibility. They’re usually in the codebase, in the governance meetings, in the PR review queue. They’re not observers telling stories about their usage—they’re participants shaping the project’s future.
The customer confidence flywheel
There’s a positive feedback loop here that makes the Champion model self-reinforcing:
- Customers see your commitment to the project
- They trust that your product integrates well and won’t lock them in
- They adopt (or stay on) your platform
- That adoption justifies continued investment in the project
- Which deepens your commitment—and the cycle continues
This isn’t a “build it and they will come” situation. The investment pays for itself through customer confidence and retention. It’s one of the clearest lines you can draw between open source engagement and business value—even though the project itself isn’t generating revenue directly.
Measuring success
Champions, overall, want to see the project be healthy. But unlike the Adopter (who monitors health as a dependency risk), the Champion is actively responsible for making the project healthy.
CHAOSS metrics for the Champion
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Project Engagement. This model measures the sustainability of a project through technical contributions and related activity:
- Organizational Diversity. Are contributions coming from many companies, not just yours? This is the key metric for the Champion. A healthy, diverse contributor base means the project isn’t dependent on any single organization—including you. Growing that diversity is good for the ecosystem and good for your strategic position.
- D0, D1, and D2 contributor counts. D0 are people watching—they’ve starred or forked the project. D1 are people filing issues and commenting. D2 are people actually committing code. The Champion wants all three growing. If D0 is high but D1 and D2 are flat, the project has awareness but not engagement, and that’s a health signal.
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Community Service and Support. This model measures the quality of service the project provides to developers:
- Issue Response Time and Change Request Duration. Together, these metrics are a good proxy for knowing if the community is being responsive to contributors. And that’s partly your responsibility as a company who may be growing their contributions. If response times are slow, the Champion should be asking what they can do to help—not just observing the problem.
The internal metric
There’s also a metric Champions track that doesn’t appear in any CHAOSS model: customer sentiment around open source commitment. Are your customers mentioning your open source involvement positively? Are sales conversations smoother because prospects trust your ecosystem engagement? That’s harder to measure, but it’s often the metric that justifies the investment internally.
Anti-patterns to watch for
Becoming a gatekeeper instead of a steward. If your company has a lot of committers and maintainers, it’s easy to inadvertently become the bottleneck. You’re supposed to be championing the project—not controlling it. If external contributions are languishing because your team hasn’t reviewed them, you’ve crossed from champion to gatekeeper.
Over-contributing to the point where others feel crowded out. Similar to the above, if your company dominates the commit history, the mailing list, and the governance meetings, other potential contributors may feel like there’s no room for them. This also goes for nontechnical contributions. Champions need to actively make space—not just fill every gap themselves.
Treating it as a pure brand exercise without genuine technical investment. Some companies want the perception of being a Champion (the logos, the sponsorship mentions, the conference keynotes) without the actual engineering commitment. The community sees through this quickly. Although nontechnical support of a project can get a company far, Champions earn their standing through contribution, not through marketing spend.
Letting financial support substitute for participation. Writing checks to a foundation is valuable—but it’s not the same as having folks on payroll in the trenches. Money without people doesn’t earn you community standing.
Examples in the wild
- Snowflake + Apache Iceberg: Customer-driven engagement with an open table format that Snowflake’s users were already demanding. The investment demonstrates commitment to open standards and interoperability.
- Google + Kubernetes: Created it, donated it to CNCF, and now champions it as part of a broader cloud-native ecosystem strategy. GKE exists, but Kubernetes itself runs everywhere.
- Microsoft + the Linux kernel: Became one of the top contributors not because they sell Linux, but because Azure runs on it and their customers demand excellent Linux support.
The Champion in context
The Champion model sits in an interesting space. You’re investing more heavily than the Adopter—there are real, paid resources being committed—but you’re not necessarily monetizing the project directly like The Business does. That means the justification for the investment has to come from somewhere else: customer confidence, ecosystem positioning, or strategic diversification of a project’s contributor base.
When it works, it’s one of the most sustainable engagement models. The customer demand creates a natural, ongoing justification for the investment. The community benefits from having a well-resourced contributor who isn’t trying to capture the project for commercial purposes. And the company earns trust that translates directly into customer retention.
When it doesn’t work, the engagement erodes quickly. This happens when the Champion becomes a gatekeeper, or treats it as brand-only, or loses the internal justification. And trust, once lost in a community, is very hard to rebuild.
Next up: The Business—what happens when your revenue depends on the project’s success, and the community knows it. Subscribe so you don’t miss it.