StackBlitz is joining the Open Source Pledge
We’re thrilled to announce that StackBlitz is joining the Open Source Pledge, an initiative led by Sentry for companies to pay their share back to Open Source projects.
At StackBlitz, we’ve always been committed to supporting the Open Source Ecosystem that surrounds us. We use Open Source to build our products, and Open Source maintainers are one of the most active communities using our tools. We’re particularly invested in the Vite ecosystem, which has seen exponential growth over the past years. Vite is an amazing match for WebContainers and we’ve been backers of Vite since 2021. At the start of 2022, more than two years ago, I was hired to work full-time on Vite. You can read more about my experience in my Open Source at StackBlitz blog post. We have also recently expanded our Open Source team by hiring Ari Perkkio, a Vitest core team member.
Funding Open Source infrastructure
Vite showed the compounded effects of expanding the frameworks shared base, creating together a platform to collaborate on and improve the DX of all our projects. And at StackBlitz, we continued by helping other efforts to expand the web tooling commons.
Volar
Frameworks today require features like auto-completion, typing info, and refactoring tools. Implementing proper IDE support with TypeScript awareness is a task that every project used to maintain in isolation. When Johnson Chu started working to extract the framework-agnostic parts of Vue language tools to benefit everyone, we saw many similarities with the Vite’s first steps. We decided to help him so he could make his vision for Volar a reality. StackBlitz became Volar’s main sponsor from the beginning of 2023. Johnson has done a fantastic job and a very active team is working together on Volar’s core infrastructure and main extensions. Volar powers Vue, Astro, and MDX IDE support, and is poseid to become part of the shared infrastructure of modern web frameworks.
Vitest
Vitest is another big piece of the web dev puzzle. Vitest provides a full-featured testing framework. It unifies the processing pipeline of the dev, build, and test environments. Last year, StackBlitz started sponsoring Anthony Fu and Vladimir Sheremet for their work on Vitest, and their incredible contributions to push forward the Vite ecosystem.
Wasm
StackBlitz had also been sponsoring other maintainers like Long Yinan, the creator of napi-rs, a framework for building pre-compiled Node.js add-ons in Rust. We also have sponsored low-level work on critical missing pieces, like Wasm support of Sharp, and started sponsoring Toyo Li. His work on emnapi, which powers napi-rs, and was used to enable the official Sharp Wasm target, is invaluable.
Detailed contributions
StackBlitz hires OSS maintainers to work on Vite and Vitest, and we are also helping the Vite Ecosystem by organizing ViteConf. Here, we will only count the contributions made by StackBlitz to projects and external maintainers towards the Open Source Pledge.
2022
We become the largest backer of the Vite team at the end of 2021:
2023
In 2023, we also became Volar’s main sponsor and started sponsoring Vitest team members.
- Johnson Chu, Volar, $60,000
- Evan You, Vite Team, $24,000
- Anthony Fu, Vitest, $1,500
- Vladimir Sheremet, Vitest, $1,500
2024
In October this year, we would have contributed:
- Johnson Chu, Volar, $60,000
- Evan You, Vite Team, $20,000
- Anthony Fu, Vitest, $5,000
- Vladimir Sheremet, Vitest, $5,000
This gives us a projected total of over $5,000 per developer annually.
OSS sustainability
We’re excited to be part of the Open Source Pledge, and encourage other companies to join us. The future of our companies and Open Source depends on us all paying back the uncountable hours of work that maintainers put into the tools and libraries we use every day. We need to ensure the sustainability of the Open Source ecosystem, and we’re hopeful that initiatives like the Open Source Pledge will become a standard for our industry.
And to celebrate the Open Source movement and the Web, join us this October 3rd at ViteConf 24. The Vite Ecosystem is one of the best examples of what Open Source teams can build when they work together.
