Thesis 8 of the manifesto puts the problem in plain terms: “technological autonomy rests less on licences than on people: without a critical mass of maintainers paid to look after critical bricks, free software becomes a technical debt funded by others than us.” The European open source ecosystem does not die for lack of open licences — it dies for lack of lasting funding. And in fact, funding does exist, but it is overwhelmingly American: the concentration of contributions and lead sponsorships in the key foundations (Linux Foundation, Apache, etc.) reflects, in monetary terms, the balance of power that thesis 12 describes in market shares.
Five commitments structure a multi-level response.
On the European providers side, two complementary commitments. Funding upstream projects of which they are the primary economic beneficiaries (see commitment pub-002): a SaaS publisher relying on PostgreSQL, Linux, Kubernetes and dozens of other bricks without any fraction of its revenue flowing back to those projects creates a manifest asymmetry. Contributing to European foundations (see commitment pub-007) — Eclipse Foundation Europe, OW2, NLnet, Codeberg — means sustaining the organisations that may one day host strategic projects under sovereign governance.
On the user organisations side (see commitment user-006), allocating a documented fraction of the software budget — typically 0.5% to 2% — to the direct funding of the open source foundations the organisation depends on turns passive consumption into active participation. It is a management decision, not a generous one.
On the individual developers side (see commitment dev-006), supporting the maintainers of critical packages through direct financial contributions — GitHub Sponsors, Open Collective, Liberapay, targeted micropayments — pours back into the chain what one consumes daily from it. The January 2022 incidents on colors.js and faker.js, where a maintainer sabotaged his own libraries out of frustration at the absence of compensation, illustrated how fragile the equilibrium is.
On the investors and European funds side (see commitment fund-002), allocating a fraction of the capital under management to the direct funding of European open source projects hosted in a neutral foundation makes the sovereign dimension an explicit asset of the investment thesis.
These five commitments are not redundant: they mobilise different channels (publisher revenue, user software budget, individual developer contribution, investor asset allocation), and they can act in parallel. It is their cumulation that transforms the ecosystem.
For documentation of the current concentration of contributions, see the annex Family 4 — Contribution concentration.