A reflection on how commercial open source funding actually works for small, foundational specification projects like OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, and linting tools. The author argues that governance specs cannot have a commercial tier without eroding trust, and walks through funding options — foundation membership, earmarked sponsorship via a fiscal host, consulting services, reputation conversion, and employer sponsorship — concluding that funding and governance must be designed together so an artifact survives a maintainer changing jobs.
Questions this post answers
Why can't an open source governance specification have a commercial or enterprise tier?
A governance format with a paid tier cannot be fully trusted, because whenever the project must choose between what the free format needs and what the paid version needs, users will reasonably assume the paid version wins. This undermines the core value of a governance specification, which is trustworthiness, so monetizing the format itself is considered incompatible with that trust. Developers weighing open-core versus fully open licensing models can track these funding debates on daily.dev.
What are the main ways maintainers fund open source API specification projects?
Options include foundation membership, earmarked sponsorship through a fiscal host, consulting and services built around the project, converting reputation into jobs or speaking roles, and relying on an employer that tolerates the work. Employer-based funding is described as the most common but most fragile, since a company's changing priorities can abruptly stop the work without anyone downstream being consulted. Maintainers evaluating sustainable funding models follow this kind of analysis on daily.dev.
Why does an open source project need both funding and distributed governance to survive long term?
Because paying a maintainer solves the money problem but not the survival problem, while distributing governance authority solves survival but pays nobody. An artifact only truly survives a maintainer changing jobs when funding, governance, and hosting decisions are designed together as one interconnected question rather than handled separately. Teams planning long-term open source sustainability strategies can follow this reasoning on daily.dev.