Code not required! The many ways of contributing to OSS (JCON 2026)

Nowadays open source software is the foundation of every modern hard- and software. Especially free open software, often developed and maintained by individual persons in their spare time, became part of critical infrastructure worldwide. It's time to give open source projects something back to provide a borader, more solid and more sustained foundation for their maintainance, isn't it?

In this talk I will amplify the relevance of open source software in today's world. I will show that there are many different ways to support open source projects, both as a private person or company, - writing code is only one of them. In addition I will present how the German government sponsors open source projects and how some well known projects benefit from this.

Transcript

1. Code not required! The many ways of contributing to Open Source Software (OSS)
2. About me Matthias Bünger  Software engineer  Maven committer  @bukama@mastodon.social  @bukama.bsky.social
3. Me some years ago… OSS sounds cool, but I’m not a good programmer, so I can never contribute.
4. Agenda  Importance of Open Source Software in today‘s world  Motivation to contribute  The many ways to contribute  Real examples of funded OSS projects
5. Importance of Open Source Software
6. Are you using Open Source Software?
7. OSS is everywhere Image created with Freepik
8. https://xkcd.com/2347/
9. HBS: The value of OSS (2024)  “OSS appears in 96% of codebases”  “some commercial software consists of up to 99.9% OSS”  “We estimate the supply-side value of widely-used OSS is $4.15 billion, but that the demand-side value is much larger at $8.8 trillion. We find that firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software than they currently do if OSS did not exist” Source: Manuel Hoffmann, Frank Nagle, and Yanuo Zhou: The Value of Open Source Software
10. Benefits of OSS in a scientific field “Schmidt & Porter (2001) suggest that Open Source can be effective within communities with unmet software needs, citing science as one such area. Their argument is that the market represented by scientists is not large enough for the software industry to be interested in, […] so scientists have a very good reason to produce Open Source software if they do not want to leave research and start a specialist software company.” Source: Hamish Harvey and Dawei Han - The relevance of Open Source to hydroinformatics (2002)
11. Digital Sovereignty & Security Image illustration created by Scriberia with The Turing Way community, used under a CC BY 4.0 licence. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3332807 (German) Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) “Studies have shown that the support provided for open- source software is often better than that offered for manufacturer- specific programs.”
12. Motivation to contribute
13. As an individual  Learn / improve own skills  Show gratitude / give something back (to the community)  Networking  Promote yourself
14. As an individual Possible problems: Getting money / discounts for it  Freelancer  Sideline activity  Voluntary work  Germany: Ongoing petition “Recognition of Work on Open-Source as Volunteering”
15. As a company  Keep the own business running (bug fixes, patches)  Marketing of your own brand / products  Increase reputation  As employer  As market participant  Increase digital sovereignty & competitiveness  Forced by law (e.g. Cyber Resilience Act )
16. As a government  Support countries economy  Increase reputation  Increase digital sovereignty & competitiveness  Forced by law (e.g. Cyber Resilience Act )
17. The many ways of contributing
18. Security work Release management PR reviews User support Blogging / information People management Website Admin Mailing List Admins Debugging PR merging CI maintenance Find sponsors Documentation Event planning Feature development Bug fixing Doing talks Maintenance tasks
19. Code not required “While we often think of contributions to open source as code, a contribution can be anything - good questions, documentation, design, event coordination, and so on also qualify as contributions. Projects need your skills, even if you’re not a programmer.” – Apache Software Foundation Source: ASF-Contributing
20. As an individual Talk about Enhance documentation Bug fixing Advertise it Translate Spelling / Grammar Fix inconsistent content Fix convoluted wording Testing Reviews Analyze issues Dependency updates Feature development
22. As a company  Give employees time to work on OSS  Donate services / products / licenses to OSS projects  Organize / support events  e.g. Hackathons, JUG meetings or conferences  Donate money
23. Does your company have an OSS strategy?
24. The role of software foundations  Host projects to reduce risk of control by single vendor  Legal management (licensing, copyrights, patents etc.)  Provide infrastructure  Funding & promotion (donations, sponsorships, marketing)
25. As a government  Fund individuals, companies, or institutions to contribute  Example Sovereign Tech Fund / Fellowship by German government  Fundings by the European Union  ~ € 100 Billion “Every €1 invested in open source generates at least €4 in economic value across Europe, thanks to reuse, reduced duplication, and digital innovation”
26. Real examples of funded OSS projects
27. Sovereign Tech Fund  Benefits  Better work-life-balance for maintainers  Time to do things which would not be done without funding  Problems  Which team members get a funding?  Rest of team not available all day
28. Adopt Renovate Extension Improvements Improved Test Reports Automated Release Verification Parameterized Test Classes Improved Kotlin Support Safe Cancellation Improved Parallel Execution Documentation Improvements
29. JPMS Support JUnit 3 to Junit 5 Replacement DI Rewrite Surefire Plugin OpenSSF Scorecards JIRA to GitHub migration Documentation Improvements
30. Split repository to improve build Documentation Improvements Improved memory management Automatic migration between logging frameworks OSS-Fuzz integration Fix API compatibility checks Performance improvements and tests SBOM Generation Unified date-time formatting Native compilation support Modernization (Java, Junit and more)
31. Start your journey  Take a look at a project you are interested in  Watch out for “Good first issue” or “Up for grab” issues  Ask the developers where a new (first time) committer could help