Announcing the Recipients of the 2023 Spotify FOSS Fund

TL;DR It’s back! Last year, we created the Spotify FOSS Fund to help support the free and open source software projects we use at Spotify. We’re excited to announce that the fund has returned for 2023, and the recipients have been selected. This year, the fund’s 100,000 EUR are going to the following four projects: AssertJ, Jdbi, Testcontainers, and Xiph. 

The 2023 Spotify FOSS Fund recipients

Just like last year, the recipients of the 2023 fund were nominated by Spotify’s internal R&D community and are listed among our thousands of internal dependencies. The FOSS Fund committee narrowed the nominations down to a short list of 12 eligible candidates before selecting the final four to share this year’s budget of 100,000 EUR. Read more about the fund’s criteria and eligibility requirements here.

“The recipients are all independent projects that are meaningful to Spotify’s tech stack and the work we do,” said Tyson Singer, Spotify’s Head of Technology and Platforms. “We chose projects that we believe can most benefit from our financial support, whether the funds are used for improving the codebase, fixing security vulnerabilities, or continuing the development of the projects as their maintainers see fit.” 

In addition to donating financial support, the purpose of the fund is to bring attention to independent open source projects and their value to the wider community. “We hope more people will hear about these great projects, and we encourage others to use and contribute to them,” said Tyson. “For the broader open source ecosystem to be sustainable, we should all recognize the projects that are important to us and the greater tech community, and find ways to support them.” 

The recipients of the 2023 Spotify FOSS Fund are:

• AssertJ: This Java library helps engineers write clean tests by making assertions and errors much more readable than with plain JUnit or other libraries. Used in many of our critical tests, it’s found in 764 of our repositories containing production components. Receiving: 25,000 EUR
  
• Jdbi: This library provides easy access to relational data in Java. As one Spotify engineer said when nominating this project, “We use Jdbi a ridiculous amount,” and we suspect we are not alone in that. Currently, artifacts from org.jdbi are used in 379 of our production repos on GHE. We also have our own internal libraries of Jdbi utilities and JUnit 5 extensions for Jdbi, which are very popular among our teams. Receiving: 25,000 EUR
  
• Testcontainers: Another Java library used for testing, Testcontainers was also part of last year’s fund, receiving 13,000 EUR. And there’s a good reason why it’s back in 2023: nearly all of Spotify’s backend services use Testcontainers for running Docker containers during testing. Receiving: 25,000 EUR

• Xiph: Having garnered the most nominations from Spotifiers last year, the nonprofit Xiph.org Foundation received 19,000 EUR from the fund in 2022 and returns as a recipient this year. The foundation’s audio containers and codecs — such as Ogg, Opus, Vorbis, and FLAC — have been used at the core of the Spotify experience since the very beginning, from our first stream all the way up to our current (and future) products. We reference the foundation’s documentation in our onboarding materials, and their educational content continues to provide value for Spotifiers, both new and experienced alike. Receiving: 25,000 EUR

The Spotify FOSS Fund is part of our commitment to investing in a more sustainable open source ecosystem and giving back to the community we rely on. We thank all the maintainers of these projects for the work they’ve done in the past — and all they’ll do in the future.

Tags: engineering leadership