Joining the Open Source Pledge

Today, Convex is taking a meaningful step to support the open source ecosystem we rely on. We're joining the Open Source Pledge, a coalition of companies committed to funding the open foundations of modern software.

Like every software company, Convex is built extensively on open source software. The developers who maintain these open source projects pour incredible amounts of time, expertise, and care into their work–usually as a labor of love. I know a little about this personally.

I was a huge open source creator for the first 15 years of my career. I deeply admired projects like FreeBSD and Python, and developers like djb and Fabrice Bellard. I wrote a lot of bad software along my path to write anything decent.

When I finally wrote some useful things, and some of them took off, it was a lot less satisfying than I had hoped. It ends being a great open source maintainer is a lot of work! And it was difficult to justify spending a lot of time on PRs, issues, and community conversations about things that were irrelevant to my full-time job. So I neglected the project, ultimately was a very poor maintainer, and then a better, more committed team took things over and dramatically improved the project.

So, I'm all in on the Open Source Pledge. I've known the folks behind it, like David Cramer and Chad Whitacre, for over a decade. I know what they stand for, and I agree: it's time for beneficiary companies to do what they can to foster more sustainable stewardship of OSS projects. So here's our first annual report!

Our 2024 Report

The Open Source Pledge asks for $2,000 per full-time developer. Last year, we made a $100,000 contribution to the TanStack Start project, netting us out to $7,692 per developer.

Looking forward

This is just the beginning for Convex. We plan to expand our sponsorship efforts to more projects in the coming years and to roll out novel monetization opportunities for open source developers who use Convex and create Convex components.

We're also doubling down on our own open source efforts in a big way–starting today.

Like other Open Source Pledge members, we're committed to working toward a future where open source maintainers can independently focus on creating the software that moves our industry forward. If your company also builds on open source (and trust me, you do), join the pledge!

1. Embarrassment time. I had to use the Wayback machine to link to my old OSS projects, since in 2014 a disk crash took down my home server and the tarsnap key to my backups containing all my 1997-2007 code. Consider that this happened while my job was building Dropbox's new, custom, exabyte-scale distributed storage system. (I assure you your Dropbox files are safe, though.) ↩︎