Many Polar Signals employees have made significant contributions to open-source projects in the past and present. Not only have we contributed but also maintained projects for long periods of time. Often overlooked is the amount of work that goes into maintaining open-source projects. Time is spent on pull requests and working with code, a lot of time is spent working on documentation, road maps, setting up governance, and building a community along with mentoring. All of it is hard and sometimes unthankful but necessary work.
Therefore, we are aware of how crucial support for open-source project maintainers is.
Standing on the shoulders of giants
Polar Signals depends on a plethora of projects both from the Go and JavaScript/TypeScript ecosystem. Thankfully GitHub has a built-in dependency graph to know what projects both Polar Signals and Parca projects depend on and knows which maintainers want to be sponsored. You can find the developers to sponsor for your accounts and organizations under https://github.com/sponsors/explore
Starting this week, Polar Signals is sponsoring multiple open-source maintainers on GitHub working on tools Polar Signals depends on for projects like Parca, Parca Agent, and FrostDB.
Going forward
While we’ve started to sponsor developers of projects we directly depend on, there may be certain developers that aren’t as obvious, such that tooling would pick it up, as writers of documentation or developers mentoring other developers. Just after sponsoring the first developers and a screenshot of the GitHub activity was shared on Twitter. Throughout the Twitter thread it became clear that not all developers show up in the list of possible developers to sponsor. Maybe indirect dependencies aren’t reported?
Polar Signals will continue to sponsor these maintainers and we are going to diversify our sponsoring efforts to an even wider developer audience in the next months.
Encouraging Others!
Finally, we'd like to start a trend and encourage other companies to give back to the very open-source developers they rely on, in that spirit, we would like to challenge our friends at Authzed to also increase their sponsorship of open-source developers and ask them to nominate the next company to do so. We hope to gain some momentum through this and make open-source development supported by individuals more sustainable!