Closing Creators' Money Fields, Spotify Even Disburses Funds For Independent Developers

Spotify will target independent and actively managed projects, (photo: Imtiyaz Ali/Unsplash)

JAKARTA - Not long ago closing funds for its creator content in Greenroom, now Spotify is actually pouring money to support independent open source projects.

The project, dubbed the Free and Open Source Software Fund (FOSS Fund), Spotify says, aims to draw attention to independent open-source projects and give back to developers.

"This is just a preliminary number and that as with any new program, the company wants to test it before deploying it more widely," said Spotify's open-source technology lead, Per Plug.

The new fund will start from 100,000 euros equivalent to IDR 1.5 billion. Later these funds will be disbursed to open source projects throughout the year, which will provide financial support to developers and help them maintain the project, including fixing security vulnerabilities.

In this case, Spotify will target projects that are independent and actively managed, and cannot be run by the people who work at Spotify.

"Spotify uses open-source software to provide the best audio experience for creators and listeners around the world," Spotify said as quoted by TechCrunch, Tuesday, April 26.

“In fact, we are like many other technology companies who rely on open source. However, open-source developers often make these projects available for us to use without any compensation. These projects support and enable our engineering team to do their best work, and we want to acknowledge that."

In order to be more careful in choosing projects, Spotify deployed the company's in-house R&D team, including engineers, data scientists, researchers, and many others they thought were worthy of support. Fund recipients will be announced in May.

The company says that the new funding will have a direct impact on the sustainability of certain open source projects, but that to create a fully sustainable ecosystem, more solutions need to be found.

To continue this effort, Spotify said that it has joined forces with the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) to support open source security initiatives.

For information, the announcement came when Spotify recently closed its Greenroom Creator Fund. In an email, Spotify notifies creators that creator funds are no longer available. This also marks the company will be introducing other new monetization options for live creator content in the future.