At Pydantic, open source isn't just a part of our story — it is our story.
As well as developing and maintaining open source libraries, we're using and contributing to many open source projects as we build Pydantic Logfire, our observability platform and primary commercial product.
Today, we're happy to announce our commitment to the Open Source Pledge where we commit to investing at least $2,000 per developer per year in open source projects and maintainers.
Spending money to maintain your supply chain shouldn't require an initiative and a glossy website, but for too long the open source ecosystem has been taken for granted. We're proud to be part of the movement to change that.
Our Open Source DNA
Pydantic started as a side project. Today, it's downloaded more than TypeScript and used by millions of developers in companies of all sizes. It has changed my life by allowing me to start this company and build the observability tool I've dreamed of for years.
Our commitment
We want maintaining Open Source to make financial sense as well as being intellectually rewarding for more developers.
At the risk of sounding grandiose, my ultimate hope is that investing in Open Source today has the stratospheric return on investment that investing in universities did 800 years ago.
Through the Pydantic Open Source Fund Pydantic is committing to spending at least $2,000 per developer per year to support open source projects and maintainers.
With 11 devs as of October 2024, that's currently $22,000 per year.
That's in addition to the roughly $250,000 we've spent in the last year developing, documenting and maintaining Open Source libraries like Pydantic, pydantic-core, Jiter and FastUI — e.g. here I'm not including "Open Source for commercial purposes" like the Logfire Python SDK or the logfire demo.
How we choose projects to support
The Pydantic team maintains numerous major open source projects including PyO3 (David Hewitt), uvicorn (Marcelo Trylesinski), starlette (Adrian Garcia Badaracco & Marcelo Trylesinski), virtuoso (Petyo Ivanov) but to avoid conflicts of interest we won't include support for these OSS developers in our fund.
We'll choose projects to support that we use in the following order of priority:
- Projects we rely on for our commercial products
- Projects we rely on for our open source libraries
(Of course projects we rely on for both will be highest priority)
After that we'll select projects based on the following priorities:
- How critical the project is to what we're doing
- How in-need the project is of financial support
- How impactful our funding will be in improving the project in ways we care about
- How aligned the project is with our values
Projects we're supporting
Projects and maintainers we're sponsoring this year:
- arrow-rs Official Rust implementation of Apache Arrow — $12,000
- encode Httpx, Starlette, Uvicorn — $2,400
- messense PyO3, maturin, maturin-action — $1,200
- squidfunk Material for MkDocs — $1,200
- pawamoy mkdocstrings, griffe — $1,200
- 15r10nk pytest inline-snapshots, executing — $1,200
- pytest pytest, pytest-asyncio — $1,200
- dvarrazzo psycopg — $1,200
- tokio tokio — $1,200
- dtolnay anyhow, rust-toolchain — $1,200
Total: $24,000 – $2,181 per developer
Join us in supporting Open Source
To the maintainers and contributors who keep the open source ecosystem thriving: THANK YOU. Your work makes ours possible, and we're honored to support you through this fund.
Mechanical and structural engineering companies have always spent a large proportion of their revenue on their supply chain (Claude suggests 75% to 85% of the cost of goods sold goes on suppliers, I couldn't immediately find a better source).
The extraordinary adoption of software over the last few decades has led software engineering companies to assume they can get away without investing in their supply chain.
But I think that's wrong, I think software has eaten the world in spite (not because) of the lack of investment in the open source supply chain.
High profile security incidents are just the most visible evidence of the problem. The bigger and more insidious side effect of the lack of investment is all the projects that have died or never even been started because those who benefit from open source are so reluctant to pay for it in a meaningful way.
You or your company should stop being such tight-fisted bastards and pay the people who have helped you get rich, it might make you even richer, it might also make the world a better place.
P.S.: We're hiring:
- Platform (DevOps) engineer
- Rust / Database developer to work on our database, based on Apache DataFusion
If you think what we're working on sounds interesting, please get in touch.
