Open Source: update spring ’24

Sponsoring

We have now funded 748 of our 1,197 direct dependencies, providing support to 154 organizations and maintainers. Our approach remains unchanged; we continue to fund everything we use for $1.

See our previous post for more details on how GitHub bulk sponsoring helps us to give back to as many projects as possible.

In recent weeks we have again seen how important it is to support maintainers of free open source software (FOSS) and what happens when we do not:

• Redis, a popular data store, changed its licenses to disallow free commercial use. This was a hostile takeover by a commercial entity.
• xz, a data compression tool, was altered to include a backdoor. This was a long term effort to infiltrate a widely used project where the sole maintainer lacked capacity and invited others to help out.
• polyfill.io was sold to an untrusted party by a single maintainer.

We strongly believe in gifting back in return for our use of open source software. It’s not just about software; it’s about supporting the people behind it.

Polyfill.io

We were taken by surprise by the recent change in ownership of polyfill.io and the abrupt end of the polyfill-library project. We had conversations about taking over polyfill.io from the Financial Times in 2023 but this didn’t go anywhere. We can’t help but ponder if we might have been a more stable new home for the project.

However, the only way is forward, so we did a hard fork and we will carry on work there.

Everything we do at Mr. Henry is rooted in following web standards. We firmly believe this approach is essential to give strong forward and backward compatibility guarantees to our clients. We want our projects to function for all users now and 10 years from now and polyfills play a crucial role this strategy.