Frappe is a 100% open source company that also has a sustainable business model. It took us a while to get here, but we have reached here by building our products on top of excellent, well-maintained and liberally licensed libraries.

While there's a lot of turbulence in open source space with companies flip-flopping on their licenses or just misleading the users with open-core, we have stood our ground with 100% free and open source.

Background

We believe true open source will ultimately win, as such we are continuously investing in open source ecosystem. Frappe co-founded FOSS United which is now rapidly becoming the biggest FOSS community in India. We also provided small funding and support to projects using Frappe incubator program.

While maintaining Frappe projects, we've witnessed the churn in dependencies firsthand. It takes a considerable amount of work to build high-quality libraries and keep maintaining them for years. These open-source projects are also notoriously hard to monetize, so the only ways they can survive are volunteer efforts, support contracts, and sponsorships. Zerodha's investment in Frappe way back in 2020 provided us a safety net and freedom to take risks that eventually helped us reach where we are today.

This year, Frappe recorded decent profits for the first time. We were wondering about how to tastefully invest this money in our future. Our investments in FOSS so far didn't go back to people we directly benefited from, so I proposed donating a small sum to our dependencies and it was accepted wholeheartedly.

How did we pick the projects?

Algorithmically spraying money on all dependencies didn't feel right. So we set up an internal nomination system and a rough guideline:

• Prioritize important dependencies
• Prioritize non-commercial projects
• Keep the number of recipients small enough

I proposed a total of $15,000 for the first iteration. The number was quite arbitrary, that's roughly what we pay new engineers (We are based in India). Anyway, I am fully expecting this to grow in next iteration.

These are the projects we picked:

1. RQ - Frappe's background job implementation is built using RQ. It's primarily maintained by a single maintainer.
2. Pallets - Project that built and now maintains Flask, Werkzeug, Click, Jinja, etc.
3. Plone - Project that built Zope which powered the first version of Framework and RestrictedPython that still powers server scripts.
4. methane - They built PyMySQL and mysqlclient that Frappe uses to connect to MariaDB.
5. python - Python software foundation.
6. ueberdosis - TipTap text editor that is used in Frappe UI.
7. numfocus - Umbrella organization that sponsors the development of scientific analysis tools like ipython and pandas.
8. asottile - Anthony wrote and maintains a lot of python tooling like pre-commit and many linting tools. He also has a YouTube channel.
9. jonhoo - Inferno Flamegraphs, several Rust crates, and excellent long-form educational content.
10. Neovim - Text editor of choice for few Frappe developers.
11. BurntSushi - Creator of RipGrep and other libraries. If you've ever used VS Code search, you're indirectly using ripgrep.
12. kovidgoyal - Author of Kitty terminal and Calibre e-book manager.
13. curl - Needs no introduction. THE tool for testing APIs.
14. fregante - Maintainer of Refined Github extension that has improved day to day experience for our maintainers.
15. ohmyzsh - Enhances ZSH, the most popular shell at Frappe.

Thanks to all of the maintainers for building and maintaining these awesome projects and inspiring us to do the same. We look forward to doing whatever we can to spread and sustain open source.