Happy New Year everyone! We on the AMP team have a New Year’s resolution that we hope will be widely shared through the industry: We want to ensure the open source projects we depend on can be maintained in a way that is sustainable for their respective core teams.
As an open source project itself, AMP is fortunate to have the benefit of support from a full time team at Google, along with many more contributors backed by their respective employers. However, not every open source project has that type of financing to pay the bills, or they might actively seek out being independent of direct corporate financial support.
This is not a sustainable state for many open source projects—the authors and maintainers of those projects need to make a living. Thankfully projects such as Open Collective have started to provide an alternative model that allows users of open source projects to contribute financially to their work. We, the AMP project, want to be part of that solution.
Last summer AMP started making regular contributions to Babel. Today we are extending that support and pledging to make funds available to more projects that we depend on as they start to accept donations.
Starting in January, we’ll contribute with monthly recurring donations to Babel (which we heavily use in our development setup), Preact (which we are planning to use in future projects), and Webpack (because they are awesome and we use it in our AMP Start project).
Please see the Open Collective pages of Babel, Preact and Webpack to become a backer yourself!
We are super excited about the opportunity to help out and are looking forward to supporting even more projects in the future. To a more sustainable open source financing model in 2018!
Malte Ubl, Tech Lead for the AMP project at Google.