What this model suggests for others

This model works because it’s built on partnership: internal shepherds who invest in their people, and open source project maintainers who open the door for them to contribute. The trust between those two sides is what makes the structure hold. For companies, that matters. Open source sustainability requires more than dependency management, sponsorship, or a call for employees to “go contribute. ” It requires a practical operating model.

Organizations need repeatable ways to connect contributor interest with maintainer needs, and to make that work visible, supported, and durable over time. The Sustaining Open Source Series is one expression of that model. It gives employees a structured path into upstream contribution, gives maintainers concentrated support for work for which they often lack bandwidth, and gives companies a repeatable way to contribute back to help sustain the critical digital infrastructure on which they and others rely. Bloomberg developed this model and has now run this series four times – first with pandas (in partnership with NumFOCUS and NVIDIA), and now with OpenTelemetry (in partnership with the CNCF). The pattern holds true across different project types, languages, and contributor profiles.

If your organization is exploring what sustained open source stewardship looks like in practice – not just in theory — we’d welcome that conversation. The outcomes are real, the model is repeatable, and the open source projects that matter most to all of us will be healthier for it. We’ll be sharing full outcomes and learnings at Open Source Summit Europe in Prague this October. To compare notes or explore a collaboration, please reach out to the Bloomberg Open Source Program Office. Bloomberg’s Open Source Program Office runs the Sustaining Open Source Series in partnership with open source foundations and project maintainer communities.