We’re proud to sponsor Babel.js in 2022 — and you should too!
3 simple steps to ask your company to sponsor Open Source this year
Babel.js is used by companies like Facebook, Paypal, Netflix, Yahoo!, Reddit, Airbnb, Spotify, LinkedIn, Slack, Axel Springer and hundreds more and is downloaded over 120 million times every month.
How much revenue did they make in 2021?....$0
How much money do they need this year?..….$330.000
How much money did they raise already?……$154.000
How much money is still missing in 2022?…..$100.000-$150.000
And Babel.js is not the only one. There are 32 billion packages being downloaded from NPM every week — most of which can be assumed to power for-profit businesses, and not a cent was paid for any of those downloads.
We’re proud to say, in 2022, Axel Springer has joined other amazing companies, who sponsor Babel.js. We’re new to this to be honest — but we’re incredibly excited about it.
In this blogpost: How you can personally help to sponsor Open Source projects in 2022, by asking your company to give back this year.
Step #1 — What? Explicitly ask your boss to sponsor an Open Source project
Last year, the Babel.js team released a blog post, detailing their current, dire funding situation: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
It was a gripping, fascinating and in-depth look into how a popular Open Source framework finances its core development. It also talked about the discouraging realization, that they might end up not being able to fund themselves fully, even though Babel.js is an integral part behind our collective frontend stacks (powering React, Next.js, Vue, Ember, Angular to name a few).
And yet, this blogpost was not the reason why we sponsored Babel.js. As embarrassing as it is to admit this, I guess the blogpost slipped through the cracks. A colleague of ours forwarded this internally, asking whether we could do something to help, and that’s the only reason why we started asking around to get a budget for this — if it weren’t for that email we would have missed it.
Step #1 to help fund Open Source in 2022: Explicitly ask your boss about the possibility of sponsoring specific projects / individuals that make your work possible. You can find Open Source projects and developers on Open Collective or Github Sponsors.
Step #2 — How? How to determine how much to give.
To be super transparent here: We didn’t know how much to give either, so I guess we opted for a gut feeling on what felt appropriate. We’re a big corporation, so I was pretty surprised we’d give that much money for a project that’s hard to explain to non technical managers (huge shoutout to my bosses Tanja Schlinck & Samir Fadlallah for making this happen!).
How much to give is not an easy to answer question. If you’re part of a very budget-driven company / business unit, then it can sometimes be a relief to have projects to spend some left-over budgets on. In that case convincing your boss won’t be that hard.
In startups / mid-sized companies? I don’t know. One way to go about it could be to ask your biz-dev or product colleagues to determine (roughly) how much additional revenue your feature-improvements helped generate last year. Take 1% of that, and you’re probably giving a generous amount already that should still be fairly realistic to get approved internally.
Step #2 to help fund Open Source in 2022: Start a conversation about what amount of money is appropriate to give back. One yard-stick could be to give back 1% of the additional revenue directly tied to feature work done by tech-teams last year. Ask your biz-dev / product colleagues for help with estimating that number.
Step #3 — Why? How this can benefit your company
It seems a bit hard to accept, but there’s most likely going to be a discussion inside your company (leadership) on why your company should sponsor something in the first place, when you know full well that most of what your company is shipping wouldn’t even be possible without Open Source.
Consider the other side here for a moment though: If nobody is paying for it (including your competitors), how does paying for Open Source make sense if it simply increases the costs at no additional value for your own company?
Asking this question is not a bad thing either — it’s the kind of thinking that keeps the lights on at the organization that provides salaried work to your nerdy ass.
So don’t think of this as something bad, instead ask yourself, what the smart business angle is here — how could this could benefit your company? How does it make sense for your company to invest money into something that is free for everyone — including your competitors?
Here’s how: You’re probably looking to hire developers this year. And what’s the best way to impress developers? Doing the right thing as a company. I know this sounds cheesy, but honestly it starts to be a differentiator in a world where tech talent is so hard to hire, the benefits everyone offers are pretty much the same, just because no-one can afford to offer anything less. Why don’t we try to add Open Source sponsorship to the standard benefits tech companies will have to offer in the future to stay interesting to applicants?
Step #3 to help fund Open Source in 2022: Realize that there’s a business case to be made — becoming more attractive to one of the hardest fought for kind of employees: Developers. Gently remind your boss of how good sponsoring OSS would make you look in the eyes of applicants.
Finally, go ahead and brag a little (exactly what we’re doing here). If as a company you’re spending money on technology that will benefit everyone, I think you’ve earned the right to be proud of that.
You did the right thing — and hopefully your next candidates will see that, too :)
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Written by Jonas Peeck — Intrapreneur Global Community Development
As my day-to-day job, I spend 100% of my time connecting the 3000+ software developers working for Axel Springer companies around the globe into one Global Tech Community.
✌🏻Thanks for reading!
