By Robin Bender Ginn, Executive Director, OpenJS Foundation

The OpenJS Foundation is proud to join peers across the ecosystem in signing the joint industry statement, “Open Infrastructure is Not Free: A Joint Statement on Sustainable Stewardship.”

This message could not come at a more urgent time. At NodeConf EU 2024, I stood on stage with a slide that read: MAGIC PILES OF MONEY. It got a laugh, but the point was serious. Too many assume that open source foundations like OpenJS have hidden reserves of cash, and that if something needs to be funded, we can simply “ask the Linux Foundation” or “pull from the pile.”

The Urgency Today

The truth is: there are no magic piles of money. OpenJS raises every dollar it needs to operate, including funding for critical infrastructure. These aren’t optional extras. They’re the backbone of our ecosystem. Registries, CDNs, CI pipelines, security response, and compliance work all cost real money. 

Without reliable, long-term funding, we’re forced to make trade-offs that put stress on our projects and the maintainers behind them.

Gratitude for Our Partners

We are deeply grateful to companies like Microsoft, Cloudflare, Fastly, DigitalOcean, and Vercel, who provide OpenJS and our projects with critical free services, from CDN bandwidth to hosting capacity. Their generosity helps us extend our reach and reliability at a scale that would otherwise be impossible.

But goodwill and in-kind support, as essential as they are, cannot alone carry the full financial burden of operating the JavaScript ecosystem’s infrastructure. We need more companies who benefit from this infrastructure to step up with direct, sustained investment.

Why We’re Speaking Up Now

By signing this joint statement, OpenJS joins with others to reiterate: commercial-scale use without commercial-scale support is unsustainable.

Billion-dollar industries depend on this infrastructure, yet the costs are shouldered by a handful of stewards and volunteers. Without new models of responsibility, we risk undermining the very systems that enable modern software development.

What Needs to Change

Companies today must evolve their business models to reflect the open source spirit of shared responsibility. If your business depends on public open source infrastructure, contributing back should not be optional. It should be built into how you operate. That means:

• Embedding open source into core jobs by dedicating employees to work directly on the projects and infrastructure they depend on.
• Investing in maintainers and infrastructure so the ecosystem stays modern, secure, and resilient.
• Becoming a member, partner, or event sponsor of the OpenJS Foundation to provide sustained, predictable support.
• Scaling responsibility with usage. High-volume end users should contribute proportionally.

Sustainability means aligning business success with the health of the open source systems that make it possible.

Call to Action

If your company depends on JavaScript, Node.js, or the many open source projects we host, now is the time to act. Engage with us. Review your practices. Become an OpenJS member, a sponsor, or a partner.

There are no magic piles of money waiting to solve these problems. What we do have is a global community that thrives on shared responsibility. It’s time we rise to meet that responsibility together.