About

OSS Citizen is a platform to gather Commercial Open Source projects maintainers and consumers.

Opensource sustainability has never been more vital as opensource adoption keeps growing and companies rely on it for their commercial products.

Opensource software like all software needs constant care. This can be in the form of bugs & security fixes, feature development, and general updates. These things are a regular part of an opensource software's lifecycle. It requires time & expertise, yet the generally adopted Opensource definition has no notion of software support & training. Companies who rely on opensource care deeply about these while building their commercial products.

The donation model for OSS projects has proven inadequate for the vast majority of OSS maintainers. The income stream from donations is insufficient and irregular to support a maintainer (let alone a team!) working even part-time on their opensource projects. GitHub Sponsors failed to address the opensource sustainability challenge. As a result, events like Heartbleed are bound to happen on a regular basis...

We choose a more sustainable approach.

With OSS Citizen, OSS maintainers will build a business around their OSS projects by providing a mixture of products and services such as:

• Software customization for a client's specific needs.
• Conversely, upstreaming a set of changes to the main repository.
• Portability integration by adding support to a new platform / operating system.
• New feature development.
• Maintenance patch update.
• Bug and security fixes.
• Code reviews of your API use of the software.
• Training and workshops (remote and/or on-site).

For companies consuming OSS software:

• Get insights on the latest and future developments of your dependencies.
• Expedite bug fixes in OSS dependencies that affect your commercial products.
• Hire expert talent to implement new capabilities in OSS projects you rely on.

Everyone wins.