FLOSS – The IT Blog

The other day, I stumbled across this visualization / article: a breakdown / reminder of who actually keeps the internet running. It’s based on that well known xkcd comic: “All modern digital infrastructure”, resting on a hastily constructed brick.

Reality is even more absurd than the joke

Every calendar invite that lands on time. Every cron job that fires at the right minute. Every flight that takes off when the schedule says it should. A huge part of that works only because a handful of people maintain the code in their spare time — unpaid.

Take the timezone database, for example. For decades, it’s been maintained largely by one guy: Paul Eggert, a lecturer at UCLA. In his free time. For free. Without it, your phone’s clock would be wrong, flights would miss connections, and global trade would grind to a halt.

And he’s not alone. Behind every login, every payment, every subscription, there’s a stack of open source software that someone keeps running, often for free, voluntarily — while the rest of us surf through social media and maybe pay subscriptions to companies.

The Funding Gap, in Actual Numbers

Yes, some companies do fund this work. OpenSSF’s Alpha-Omega distributes $7+ million a year, and just received another $12.5 million in grants from Anthropic, AWS, GitHub, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

And while 12 Million might sound huge, it’s just a fraction of a percent (~0.0012% on average) of their annual revenues, if my research is not totally off.

Even Germany has a public agency for it: the Sovereign Tech Agency has poured €61.6 million of tax money into open source since 2022, because apparently waiting for industry to step up wasn’t a plan.

Appreciate them. Genuinely.

But it’s still a drop in the ocean compared to what runs on top of it (remember: ~0.001% of revenue … but hey, we can fly tourists to space!)

For every company that funds open source, there are dozens building entire businesses on the same stack without giving anything back. Not a cent. Not a merged code contribution. And for most people, it’s not even stinginess — it’s sheer unawareness: The software just works. Nobody ever asks “who makes it work?”. That’s the real tragedy: The infrastructure is so good at being invisible that the people maintaining it are, too.

It’s about security, too

And unfortnately, this isn’t just a charity / appreciation topic: In 2024, a bad actor spent two years earning the trust of a maintainer of a tiny compression library most people had never heard of: xz, used by nearly every Linux system on Earth (including smartphones). The resulting backdoor came within inches of shipping in every major Linux distribution. One person. One project. That’s how thin the ice is that we’re all skating on.

My Small Ritual

But I don’t just want to shout “someone should do something”. I try to do my part of it:

Every time I (re)install a tool I rely on, when a major update lands, or when a piece of software saves me hours of my evening (or around christmas time) I donate some Euros. (Which can make setting up a new machine an expensive day btw.)

You don’t have to copy that. But just give it a thought: What did the open source you use save you this year? In hours? In uptime? In things that just worked? Isn’t that worth a bit?

Where to Send Money (Without Having to Judge Every Project Yourself)

If you don’t want to check out where the maintainer(s) are and how to donate to them: You don’t need to audit your whole setup. There are a couple of umbrella organizations that pool donations and distribute them to maintainers and projects at scale:

Organization	Focus	Why It Matters
OpenSSF	Security audits & critical infrastructure	Security!
Software Freedom Conservancy	Legal defense (Git, QEMU, Selenium, etc.)	Fights patent lawsuits, enforces copyleft
NumFOCUS	Scientific computing (NumPy, pandas, Jupyter)	Powers data science & AI
Apache Software Foundation	300+ projects (Kafka, Hadoop, etc.)	The backbone of big data
NLnet Foundation	Small, essential projects	A lot of small cotributors
Direct to a maintainer	GitHub Sponsors, Open Collective, Maintainer’s homepage	When a specific tool saved your week

Most of these are US nonprofits. Donations to them are not tax-deductible in Germany – but that shouldn’t stop you. If you prefer a German option, you might want to check out the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).

The Whole Ask

The internet runs on a handful of people in their spare time.

A coffee – or five – goes a long way. Also think about the emotional support: What it means if small appreciations are not only expressed with a star on Github.

Especially in times where costs for RAM and disks are skyrocketing. Those developers also need hardware to do their work.