At Prefect, open source has always been at the core of who we are. As we continue our participation in the Open Source Sponsorship Initiative, we're excited to share updates on our ongoing commitment to the open source community.
Our Continued Investment
This year, we're contributing $30,000 to support the brilliant minds behind the tools and libraries that power not just Prefect, but countless other projects and companies worldwide. This translates to approximately $2,000 per engineer at Prefect, maintaining our commitment aligned with the Open Source Pledge initiative.
Focusing on the Data Ecosystem
For 2025, we're concentrating our efforts on data-related tooling and investing in the data ecosystem. The modern data stack relies on countless open source projects, from foundational libraries to innovative new tools pushing the boundaries of what's possible with data. We believe that by focusing our support in this area, we can have the greatest impact on the community we're part of.
Supporting the Long Tail
We're taking a deliberate approach to how we allocate our sponsorship funds this year - we're allocating funds inversely proportional to the number of stars each project has. This means we're providing a greater amount of support to those projects that don't have as wide of a reach… yet.
Why? Because we believe that:
- Smaller projects often have outsized impact relative to their visibility
- Early support can be transformative for emerging tools
- The next generation of essential infrastructure often starts with just a few dedicated maintainers
- Diversity in the ecosystem benefits everyone
The Projects We're Supporting
- UpdateCLI: Automates dependency management across your infrastructure and application configurations, keeping your tools and dependencies up-to-date through declarative manifests.
- SQLAlchemy: The Python SQL toolkit and Object-Relational Mapper that provides a comprehensive set of tools for working with databases. Essential infrastructure for data applications and workflow orchestration platforms.
- HTTPX: A fully featured HTTP client for Python with both sync and async APIs, built on top of modern Python standards.
- Uvicorn: A lightning-fast ASGI server implementation for Python, powering async web frameworks and APIs.
- Starlette: A lightweight ASGI framework/toolkit for building high-performance async web services in Python.
- pytest: The most popular testing framework for Python, making it simple to write scalable test suites with powerful fixtures and plugins.
- Jinja: A modern and designer-friendly templating engine for Python, widely used for generating configuration files, HTML, and dynamic content.
- pre-commit: A framework for managing and maintaining multi-language pre-commit hooks, ensuring code quality standards before commits reach your repository.
- PyO3: Rust bindings for Python, enabling high-performance Python extensions written in Rust while maintaining Python's ease of use.
- websockets: A library for building WebSocket servers and clients in Python with a focus on correctness, simplicity, and performance.
- cyclopts: An intuitive CLI framework that leverages Python type hints to create command-line interfaces with minimal boilerplate and excellent developer experience.
Looking Forward
This initiative continues to be about more than just financial support. It's about:
- Strengthening the foundation of tools we all depend on
- Enabling maintainers to dedicate more time to their projects
- Encouraging innovation in the data ecosystem
- Building a more sustainable open source community
Join Us
We continue to encourage other companies to join us in supporting open source. Whether through financial contributions, dedicating developer time, or other resources, every bit of support helps sustain the ecosystem we all rely on.
Passionate about open source and want to be part of our mission? We're hiring!
Thank you to all the maintainers and contributors who make the open source world thrive. Your work inspires and enables us every day.
