Congratulations to the Recipients of the 2024 Spotify FOSS Fund
TL;DR The Spotify FOSS Fund is back again! We created the Spotify FOSS Fund in 2022 to help support the open source ecosystem and to lend a monetary hand to those projects we use most at Spotify. This year, we’ve selected five projects to share the €100,000 fund (€20,000 each):
Here’s what some of the recipients had to say about their projects, what kind of impact the funds might have on them, and other ways we can all help build a more sustainable open source community. (Note: some responses have been edited for length and clarity.)
Norman Maurer, Netty
Norman Maurer is a Netty project lead and co-author of Netty in Action.
What is the vision for Netty?
Netty aims to remain the de facto standard for writing network libraries/services on the JVM. Through Netty’s powerful abstraction it’s possible to easily write reusable components that can be composed to build up complex processing logic. Beside this, Netty provides support for popular internet standards like HTTP1, HTTP2 and HTTP3 and many more.
Netty also provides the most performant implementation for specific platforms (by making use of native code) and makes use of new features — like, for example io_uring, TLS — to provide low-latency / high throughput.
Artem Zakharchenko, MSW
Artem (@kettainaitto) created the library and is a full-time maintainer of MSW.
How will these funds go towards supporting the future of MSW?
MSW challenges the misconception that mocking is a hacky thing, and gives thousands of developers around the world better tools to control their network.
Support from Spotify will enable me to focus even more on the project. Since I’ve switched to working on it full time (as financially damaging as it was), we’ve already shipped a ton of improvements, like the Server Boundaries, socket-based interceptor for Node.js, and Source. Not to mention a lot of work that went into collaborating with the teams behind Vitest, Vercel, Apollo, Nock, Node.js (to name a few) to ensure consistent experience for everybody, everywhere.
Later this year, I’d love to announce the WebSocket support as well, making MSW the first API mocking library to cover all major API types. That being said, there are always more things to solve. Improving debugging and error handling, polishing type definitions, exploring uncharted territories like inter-process request interception. And now I will be able to solve them with Spotify’s help!
Ketan Umare, Flyte
Ketan (@kumare3) is the founder and TSC chair of Flye and co-founder and CEO of @UnionAI
What is the vision for Flyte?
As generative AI advances, we aim to position Flyte at the forefront of this transformation, uniting data, ML, and AI seamlessly.
The vision is to enable ML engineers and AI teams to build, deploy and scale ML Workflows with an open-source, kubernetes-native, pythonic orchestration kit. To accomplish this, Flyte provides a free, modern workflow orchestration platform. This platform enables teams to build production-grade pipelines, easily handle large datasets and efficient scheduling while working on complex infrastructure in distributed environments. Our mission is to enable ML engineers to focus more on solving business challenges and less on debugging and testing workflows. We are dedicated to building the world’s largest, most collaborative ML engineering community.
Sam Pillsworth, Typelevel
Sam (@samspills) is a TSC member of Typelevel and is based out of Toronto, Ontario.
How will these funds go towards supporting the future of Typelevel?
Maintaining an organization at the scale of Typelevel incurs costs. Through FOSS funding we can provide better support to maintainers, and make stronger guarantees to users, by paying for things like CI infrastructure or community support.
Our current funding goes towards recurring infrastructure expenses, and sending members of our code of conduct committee for training to better support our community.
With these extra funds, we’d like to expand our initiatives to encourage and support new contributors and users! We’ve specifically discussed funding student or first time contributors through an initiative like Outreachy and engaging a technical writer to help improve documentation.
Thank you to all the maintainers of these projects for all the work they’ve done for these projects!
Tags: engineering leadership
