We just gave a million dollars to Open Source maintainers

Sentry announced a $1,000,000 commit to open source maintainers, increasing its annual budget from $750,000 and reinforcing a multi-year effort to fund the tools its business depends on. The company frames open source as essential infrastructure and urges other companies to contribute through its Open Source Pledge, now 37 member companies strong and collectively responsible for $7,421,535 in payments. Sentry cited rising infrastructure costs for registries (noting a ~69% AWS spend increase reported by the Python Software Foundation) and emphasized the AI stack’s reliance on open source, singling out NumFOCUS as a continued beneficiary. The pledge is promoted as an easy, ethical step to avoid freeloading.

The $1,000,000 was allocated across several channels: $495,000 routed through thanks.dev to pay hundreds of package maintainers automatically; $100,000 through ecosyste.ms to support critical packages across Python, Django, Ruby, Rust, JS and Go; and targeted grants informed by Software Stewardship Lab research to find “phantom” dependencies. Foundation grants include $60,000 to the Python Software Foundation, $45,000 to the PHP Foundation, $40,000 each to Ruby Central and the Django Software Foundation, plus contributions to Packagist, OSI, Rust Foundation, OpenJS, NumFOCUS and others. A separate $100,000 from the Syntax team funded individual projects and maintainers (many $5,000 grants to projects like FFmpeg, FreeCAD, pnpm, mswjs, and maintainers such as antirez and mholt, with smaller awards to several Three.js contributors).