TL;DR: One year ago, we launched the Astral OSS Fund with a commitment to support open source projects and maintainers. We originally pledged to give $26,000 in the first year of the fund, but ultimately donated a total of $70,000 to open source projects, the Rust and Python language foundations, and Trifecta Tech for their zstd decompression work.

We're continuing our commitment to funding open source projects by pledging another $44,000, or $2,700 per developer, in alignment with the Open Source Pledge initiative.

What did we donate last year?

A year ago, we made a commitment to give back to the open source community that forms the foundation of everything we do at Astral. We started the Astral OSS Fund with a first-year pledge of $26,000 — $16,000 for projects and maintainers, plus $10,000 for language foundations.

Looking back, we exceeded this commitment as our team and corresponding budget grew, with our OSS Fund donations totaling over $31,000. Over the past year we:

  • Supported 32 open source projects across the Python and Rust ecosystems, providing $21,345 in total funding to maintainers.
  • Donated $10,000 to language foundations — $5,000 each to the Python Software Foundation and Rust Foundation.

In addition to our pledged fund, we also made an opportunistic, one-time $38,500 donation to Trifecta Tech to support their zstd decompression work — a performant, compatible zstd decoder written in Rust. While not part of our planned budget, it is an impactful project we are proud to back.

In total, Astral donated roughly $70,000 last year. We view these donations as one way to thank, encourage, and empower the maintainers who dedicate countless hours to the projects that power our industry and tools. To the projects we've funded - from established projects like Tokio and Prettier to emerging tools like ast-grep and cargo-shear - we hope you feel our gratitude!

You can find a full list of the projects we donated to over the past year in this public Google Sheet.

How much are we giving this year?

As the number of Astral developers has grown, so have our contributions to the OSS Fund. For year two, we're planning to donate $44,000 across open source projects and foundations: $27,000 to open source projects and maintainers, and $17,000 to non-profit language foundations. This represents a $13,000 increase from our OSS Fund year one donations, and comes out to ~$2,700 per developer at Astral today.

This expanded budget will allow us to support additional projects across the Python and Rust ecosystems and increase our contributions to sponsored projects and foundations.

Who are we funding this year?

This year, we're changing our OSS Fund commitments from quarterly to annual. As a small team, annual funding commitments help reduce our administrative overhead and allow us to focus on supporting our projects. We hope this provides greater predictability and stability for maintainers, too.

Aside from changing our commitments to annual, our selection criteria and process remains largely the same as outlined in our original blog post. To qualify for funding via the Astral OSS Fund, a project must lack conflicts and 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

After collecting suggestions from our team, and reviewing the projects we funded last year, we've selected the following individuals and projects for this round of funding:

As with last year, we're balancing the number of projects we sponsor with making the amounts meaningful for maintainers. We encourage you to check out all the incredible projects and people! You can find an itemized list of sponsorship details in a public Google Sheet.

We hope this fund continues to reinforce that sponsorship should be the norm, rather than the exception.

What's next?

We'll continue improving the process, growing the budget, and supporting more projects in the future.

You can follow our ongoing sponsorships on the Astral GitHub Sponsors page, and as always, we welcome suggestions for projects we should consider supporting or how our process could be improved.

Here's to another year of building a more sustainable open source ecosystem together.

Reach out to [email protected] with any questions or feedback.

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