OSS funding in industry and large enterprises

<p>This is a merged session combining the following two lightning talks and audience Q&amp;A. 1. "Funding a FOSS Revolution in the Energy Sector" by Maximilian Perzen 2. "An Enterprise Perspective on Open Source Funding" by Tobias Gabriel and Fabian Palmer</p> <hr /> <p><em>"Funding a FOSS Revolution in the Energy Sector" by Maximilian Perzen</em></p> <p>What happens when you try to build a fully open-source ecosystem inside one of the most closed, risk-averse industries on the planet? As a former core contributor to the <a href="https://github.com/PyPSA/PyPSA">PyPSA</a> ecosystem and now co-founder &amp; CEO of a three-year-old FOSS non-profit <a href="https://openenergytransition.org/">OET</a> working on energy and grid planning, I’ve spent the last years hacking exactly that problem: pushing an industry dominated by billion-euro black-box tools toward a future built on shared code and community-driven infrastructure.</p> <p>We began with a Prototype Fund experiment that didn’t survive on its own, but it gave us just enough credibility and momentum to grow. Three years later, our organisation has scaled to 50 people working across major open-source energy planning projects (though mostly around one tool: PyPSA), supporting public, private and philanthropic partners. The “open-source revolution” in grid planning isn’t complete, but we’ve hit enough walls, breakthroughs, and strange funding dynamics to share what’s actually happening behind the scenes.</p> <p>This talk answers the questions we wish someone had answered when we started, including: - Where and how, inside a conservative industry, can open-source realistically get funded? - How do you identify which projects and maintainers are already carrying the ecosystem? - How to expand the ecosystem beyond a single institution and why this is important? - How do you convince institutions, philanthropic or private, to finance long-term maintainer time?</p> <p>This is the inside story of trying to open-source an entire domain and what other hackers can borrow from that journey.</p> <hr /> <p><em>"An Enterprise Perspective on Open Source Funding" by Tobias Gabriel and Fabian Palmer</em></p> <p>Have you wondered how open source funding works inside large companies? Whether you’re trying to start a program at your organization or understand it from a maintainer perspective?</p> <p>In this talk, we’ll share how SAP, one of the world’s largest enterprise software companies, started a direct open source funding program in 2025. We’ll cover the questions we faced, the answers we found, and what we learned along the way: - How to select projects and maintainers to support? - What metrics and tools can support in finding suitable projects? - How to determine the right funding amount? - How to organize the process and budget internally? - How to scale it further in the future?</p> <p>With this talk we would like to share our experience and insights and invite you to share your own experiences and ideas as well.</p>