We’re committing to giving back to the open source community directly — by setting up a fund to support and thank OSS maintainers for their incredible work.

Why are we creating an OSS fund?

Open source is very close to our heart at GitBook. It’s where GitBook itself started life, and open source software is still at the core of everything we do.

Many of our team maintain their own open source projects or actively contribute to others. Our own public docs rendering engine is open source. And we offer open source projects free access to GitBook — helping them document their incredible projects for everyone who uses them.

And of course, open source software is also fundamental to GitBook as a product. Without it, GitBook wouldn’t exist today.

We know that open source developers and maintainers aren’t in it for the money — they work for free because they love what they do and want to give back to their community. But their time and effort deserves support. So while our sponsorship won’t magically give them more time to work on their projects, it will at least help us show our gratitude — and help them maintain their independence.

How much are we giving?

We’re pledging $32,700 per year, spread across a range of open source projects. This equates to $2,515 per developer at GitBook.

We’ll reassess our budget regularly, but we’re committed to giving at least this amount for the next year. And as and when we hire more developers to our team, we’ll also increase our budget to keep our contributions in sync with our company growth.

Why are we tying our fund to the number of developers we have at GitBook? We’ve been inspired by Sentry and its awesome OSS Pledge initiative, and we want to join them in their mission. We can’t wait to collaborate with them on this, and build more awareness for funding open source projects.

How do we decide who to fund?

Firstly, in order to qualify for funding by GitBook, a project had to be a dependency for GitBook itself. As we mentioned, there are many open source projects at the core of the app today.

We also made sure that we didn't select any projects that are maintained by GitBook team members.

Finally, while we’ve contributed to open source projects via Open Collective and GitHub Sponsorship in the past, we’ve decided to move most of our funding to GitHub to reduce some of the administration. However, as some projects are only available on Open Collective, we’ll continue to allocate funds there, too.

Our goal with this fund is to support and thank the maintainers of these projects, as well as helping them to continue their work.

Who are we giving to?

The amount we give to each project varies depending on how essential it is to GitBook as a whole — starting at $15 and going all the way up to $1,000 — adding up to a total of $32,700 per year. Our aim is to give the projects on which we have the largest dependency the highest amounts, to show our appreciation for their work and help them continue it.

With that in mind, these are the projects and maintainers we have selected for our OSS fund for the next 12 months:

Open Collective

• Storybook: https://opencollective.com/storybook

• Typescript-eslint: https://opencollective.com/typescript-eslint

• PostCSS: https://opencollective.com/postcss

• Webpack: https://opencollective.com/webpack

• Vitest: https://opencollective.com/vitest

• Sindre Sorhus: https://github.com/sindresorhus

• Core-js: https://opencollective.com/core-js

• Libvips: https://opencollective.com/libvips

• Stylelint: https://opencollective.com/stylelint

GitHub

• unified: https://github.com/unifiedjs/unified

• Dmonad (yjs): https://github.com/dmonad

• Drizzle: https://github.com/drizzle-team

• ESLint: https://github.com/eslint/eslint

• CSSTools: https://github.com/csstools

• Wooorm: https://github.com/wooorm

• Isaacs: https://github.com/isaacs

• MikeRaplhson: https://github.com/MikeRalphson

• Prettier: https://github.com/prettier

• Babel: https://github.com/babel

• Browserslist: https://github.com/browserslist/browserslist

• Cheerio: https://github.com/cheeriojs/cheerio

• Date-fns: https://github.com/date-fns/date-fns

• AJV: https://github.com/ajv-validator/ajv

We strongly recommend you taking a closer look at these people and projects, and sponsoring them yourself if you can.

Next steps

This is just one part of our ongoing support for open source. We’ll regularly revisit the list of projects we sponsor with the OSS fund, and growing the budget to support more projects in future.

If you want to hear more about how we support open source at GitBook, or about how you can publish incredible open source docs for free, head to our open source page — and join out GitHub community!

We want to take this opportunity to say a huge thank you to all of these projects and maintainers — and to everyone who has contributed to open source software in the past. You are the people who make open source software an incredible resource for the whole planet. You inspire us every day, and we’re so proud to be part of this community.

→ Read more about open source at GitBook

→ Discover our developer docs

→ Check out our docs repository