The Sovereign Tech Fund is piloting a fellowship program to pay open source maintainers, aiming to address structural issues and support open digital infrastructure in the public interest.

Over the past two years, STF has successfully contracted over 40 FOSS projects, enhancing their technical sustainability through targeted milestones. While some contracts are with individual maintainers, most involve software development companies or foundations. Despite this success, a new and innovative program is needed to acknowledge the lived reality of how many maintainers work: stretched across multiple technologies, multi-faceted, and often behind the scenes.

Most maintainers are unpaid, working in their spare time, which both impacts projects’ stability and can lead to stress and burnout. The Tidelift Open Source Maintainer Study found that 59% of maintainers have quit or considered quitting, posing a risk to the digital infrastructure we all rely on. To even begin to mitigate this risk, it’s crucial to understand the role of maintainers, who typically lead and oversee project development, review changes, manage community interactions, release updates, and fix security issues.

The application phase will start by the end of the third quarter of 2024, and with the goal that selected maintainers can begin the fellowship in the fourth quarter. The first fellowship pilot will run throughout 2025, and we will evaluate it on an ongoing basis. Based on these evaluations, our experiences running the fellowship, and feedback from participants, we’ll determine how to expand and grow the program for a stronger and healthier open source ecosystem.