The State of OSS Funding Data

Insights from ecosyste.ms

A presentation by Andrew Nesbitt for CHAOSScon North America 2025, Denver, CO.

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Abstract

This talk explores the current state of funding in open source software, analyzing data from over 11 million packages across various ecosystems. Using the ecosyste.ms dataset, we examine:

• How many packages have funding links
• Which funding platforms are most popular
• The concentration of funding in critical packages
• Who maintains critical infrastructure
• The relationship between funding success and package maintenance

Key Findings

• Only 3.26% of all packages have funding links
• 72.8% of critical packages have no obvious way to financially support them
• 35% of critical packages are maintained by individuals, not organizations
• Well-funded maintainers tend to maintain more critical packages, creating a concentration effect
• GitHub Sponsors and Open Collective dominate the funding platform landscape

Data Sources

All data presented comes from the ecosyste.ms project, which tracks: - 11.4M packages - 262M repositories
- 1.7M maintainers - 22B dependencies

Links

• Slides: https://github.com/andrew/state-of-oss-funding
• ecosyste.ms: https://ecosyste.ms
• Funding data: https://packages.ecosyste.ms/funding
• Critical packages: https://packages.ecosyste.ms/critical

Credits

• Talk content: Hand-written by Andrew Nesbitt
• Slide generator: Written by Claude Code

Slide Generator

This repository includes an HTML slide generator that creates presentations from markdown files.

Running the slides

To view the slides locally:

```bash

Install dependencies

npm install

Generate and watch for changes

npm start ```

Then open index.html in your browser.

Usage

• Edit text.md to modify slide content
• The generator watches for changes and auto-reloads
• See formatting guide in generate-slides.js comments

Navigation

• Arrow keys (↑↓) or Page Up/Down to navigate
• Space for next slide
• F to toggle fullscreen
• Home/End to jump to first/last slide

Exporting to PDF

Option 1: Browser Print (Recommended)

1. Open index.html in Chrome or Edge
2. Press Cmd+P (Mac) or Ctrl+P (Windows/Linux)
3. Change settings:
   • Destination: "Save as PDF"
   • Layout: Portrait
   • Margins: None
   • Scale: Default (100%)
   • Options: Check "Background graphics"
4. Click "Save"

Option 2: Automated Export

```bash

Using Puppeteer (requires Node.js)

npm install -g puppeteer-cli puppeteer print index.html slides.pdf --format A4 --margin-top 0 --margin-bottom 0 --margin-left 0 --margin-right 0

Using headless Chrome directly

google-chrome --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf=slides.pdf index.html

On macOS with Chrome installed

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --headless --print-to-pdf=slides.pdf index.html ```

Option 3: Decktape (Best for presentations)

```bash

Install decktape

npm install -g decktape

Export with automatic slide detection

decktape generic --slides 1 index.html slides.pdf ```

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.