TL;DR: Astral is starting a fund to support open source projects and maintainers.

We're giving ~$3,250 per developer at Astral per year, in alignment with and inspired by Sentry's OSS Pledge initiative.

Why start an open source fund? #

Open source software is at the heart of Astral. Our team is composed of open source maintainers and contributors, our products are open source, and everything we do takes place in the context of our open source community.

In building the Astral toolchain (Ruff and uv), we also use lots of open source software. While there are many ways to give back to open source projects — such as making high quality contributions and filing bug reports — there's some work that can only be done by project owners and maintainers.

Most maintainers work on open source in their free time, balanced against the commitments of a full-time job. While sponsoring a project doesn't add more hours to the day, it does support maintainer independence and shows gratitude for the impact of their work. With the Astral OSS Fund, our goal is to help establish a precedent for giving early and often — to reinforce that sponsorship should be the norm, rather than the exception.

How much are we giving? #

We're starting our fund at $26,000 per year: $16,000 for open source projects and maintainers, and $10,000 for non-profit language foundations. This comes out to $3,250 per developer at Astral. Since this is a new initiative, we'll be assessing our budget quarterly, but we're committed to giving at least this amount over the next year. As we hire more developers, our budget will increase, keeping our contributions in sync with the growth of the company.

Anchoring the budget to the number of developers at Astral was inspired by Sentry, a leader in the open source funding movement. Our commitment is aligned with their upcoming OSS Pledge initiative, and we look forward to collaborating with them in building awareness around and normalizing open source funding.

How do we decide who to fund? #

First, we identified a set of criteria that were important to us. To qualify for funding via the Astral OSS Fund, a project needs to meet one of the following criteria:

• Aligned with our company values
• A dependency of one of our projects
• A source of inspiration for our own designs
• Fundamental to the Python or Rust ecosystems

We used an internal survey to collect suggestions from our team. We also included the projects that we were already funding, and will bias towards continuing commitments in the future.

We then ensured that candidate projects met two additional criteria:

• Availability on GitHub Sponsors: We're a small team of engineers looking to minimize administrative overhead. We've reached out to a few proposed projects that aren't available via GitHub Sponsors, but this excludes some candidates that we'd like to support in the future.
• Lack of conflicts: We avoided projects that are maintained by Astral team members.

The goal of this fund is to thank, encourage, and empower maintainers. Some maintainers offer additional features or support in exchange for funding — we think that's a good model, but we want to keep this fund separate from our business needs, so we'll make exchanges for goods and services in addition to this fund. For example, you won't see Material for MkDocs in our list of projects funded here, but we are still sponsoring them in exchange for preview documentation features.

Who are we funding? #

We're giving between $20 and $150 per month per project, plus another $10,000 to language foundations, for a total of $26,000 this year. With these amounts, we're balancing the number of projects we can sponsor with an amount that is meaningful to maintainers.

The following individuals and projects have been selected for this round of funding, which will be reviewed and expanded quarterly:

• Anthony Sottile (flake8, pyupgrade)
• Boshen (Oxc, cargo-shear)
• clap
• David Tolnay (serde, syn, quote, anyhow, and thiserror)
• Herrington Darkholme (ast-grep)
• Kat Marchán (miette, orogene)
• Koudai Aono (ruff-pycharm-plugin)
• Jelle Zijlstra (Black, Typeshed, mypy, typing-extensions)
• messense (Maturin, PyO3, cargo-xwin, cargo-zigbuild)
• Pierre Sassoulas (Pylint)
• Prettier
• Rain (Nextest)
• rkyv
• rust-analyzer
• Sean McArthur (hyper, reqwest)
• Sebastian Thiel (gitoxide, GitPython)
• Tokio
• Weihang Lo (Cargo)

We recommend checking out all these awesome projects and people! An itemized list of sponsorship details are available in a public Google Sheet.

As previously noted, we are assessing projects quarterly. We'll strive to fund projects continuously, but we want to retain some flexibility in the early days of the initiative. We plan to switch to annual commitments in the future.

As tooling developers, we also believe in supporting maintenance and development of the programming languages we work with. Consequently, we're donating $5,000 per year to both the Python Software Foundation and the Rust Foundation. We're collaborating with the Python Software Foundation to direct funds to the Python Package Index (PyPI) and CPython development in particular.

What's next? #

We've biased towards action by establishing this fund now, but the work isn't done. We look forward to improving the process, growing the budget, and supporting more projects in the future. You can follow our sponsorships on the Astral GitHub Sponsors page.

Thanks to Chad Whitacre and the Python Software Foundation for collaborating with us on kicking off the Astral OSS Fund. And, of course, thank you to all the maintainers and contributors that keep the open source community going — you're an inspiration to us.

Think you'd be a good candidate for funding or have feedback about our process? Feel free to reach out to [email protected].

Interested in the work we're doing? Passionate about open source? We're hiring.