Say Hello to the Recipients of the 2022 Spotify FOSS Fund

June 2, 2022 Published by Per Ploug, Open Source Tech Lead
Say Hello to the Recipients of the 2022 Spotify FOSS Fund

TL;DR Today we’re announcing the recipients of the first Spotify FOSS Fund. The objective of this fund is to give the independent open source projects we care about a meaningful financial sponsorship to help ensure those projects have the means to continue maintaining and maturing the code we rely on. 

The 2022 Spotify FOSS Fund recipients

The FOSS Fund committee reviewed 59 project nominations submitted by our internal R&D community along with our list of 2,454 internal dependencies to narrow the nominations down to 18 eligible candidates. (You can read last month’s post to learn more about our criteria and eligibility requirements.) After discussing those 18 candidates, we selected the final 8 recipients to share this year’s fund budget of 100,000 EUR. 

It was not easy to choose! The committee’s discussion centered around our principles of supporting independent projects that are most meaningful to the work we do. We believe we have achieved that with these selections. And so, drum roll, please…?

The recipients of the 2022 Spotify FOSS Fund are:

  • Byte Buddy: Byte Buddy is a code generation and manipulation library for creating and modifying Java classes during the runtime of a Java application, without the help of a compiler. Spotify has thousands of references to Byte Buddy, and its maintainer dedicates all of his time to maintaining these projects. Receiving: 13,000 EUR
  • MUI: Material UI is an open source React framework and the foundation of the UI in Backstage, Spotify’s homegrown developer portal, which we open sourced in 2020. Receiving: 13,000 EUR
  • protoc-jar: On the data engineering side, Spotify uses protocol buffer messages in batch (non-realtime) pipelines to store intermediate data on GCS. Receiving: 3,000 EUR (the maximum amount allowed by this project)
  • QOS.CH: This is a core developer on log4j 1.x, reload4j, slf4j, and logback, which are critical to not only us, but most of the internet. Receiving: 13,000 EUR
  • Testcontainers: Testcontainers is a Java library that supports JUnit tests and provides lightweight, throwaway instances of common databases, Selenium web browsers, or anything else that can run in a Docker container — as evidenced by the thousands of applications that reference Testcontainers at Spotify. Receiving: 13,000 EUR
  • urllib3: With over three billion annual downloads, this is one of the most popular Python packages. If you use Python, then you rely on urllib3. (Inside Spotify it is the fourth most-used Python library.) Spotify and the Python community directly depend on it for pip, Requests, and many other projects. Receiving: 13,000 EUR
  • Xiph: The non-profit Xiph.org Foundation maintains the audio codecs which are core to our audio delivery. This was the #1 nomination from Spotifiers. Receiving: 19,000 EUR (for multiple projects)
  • Yarn: Yarn helps us structure web projects, dependencies, scripts, and packaging/distribution. It is also part of our Golden Path for websites. Receiving: 13,000 EUR

Spotify’s developers are grateful for all these amazing, worthwhile projects. But of course, it’s the people behind the projects who we really want to thank with our support. Stay tuned for another post where we hear from the maintainers about the impact of the fund and more.


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