Yesterday, @fgthiel, CEO of MARA, announced the MARA Foundation. What was celebrated in Bitcoin open-source circles seemed to be met with skepticism from some shareholders.
After 9 years working full time in FOSS, and spending a lot of time on podcasts and conferences encouraging people to pursue it as a career path while advocating for more diversity and meritocracy in funding, I was disappointed to still see this disconnect.
In this post, I want to try to make the case that throwing money at open source is an investment, not philanthropy or a marketing stunt.
Here are the talking points I use when making this case to skeptics, whether inside a company or from the outside, which you can use to advocate for open-source funding or better articulate the value of your work as a FOSS contributor:
Your business depends on open-source software. As these projects evolve, technical and strategic decisions are often made outside your immediate line of sight. In most cases, you only notice them once they surface downstream as limitations or breaking changes your team now has to work around. By that point, the direction is already set.
Open source developers operate upstream, across companies and projects, and often surface issues well before they become operational or commercial problems. Supporting them provides early visibility into protocol changes, architectural decisions, and emerging trends.
Grants enable access to global talent unconstrained by hiring jurisdiction or headcount limits. While you cannot hire everywhere, you can give a grant worldwide. Over time, this creates a pipeline of potential future hires.
Open source makes high-signal people obvious. You see who takes ownership, who ships, and who operates without waiting for permission.
If you’re hiring, especially in early stages, that signal is far more reliable than anything on a resume.
It also gives access to talent that would otherwise be unreachable, contributors who are not looking for traditional roles or are outside your hiring scope. Even when they don’t join, you build long term alignment and relationships.
Over time, this compounds into both a talent pipeline and a reputation within the developer ecosystem.
Funding a small number of independent contributors provides leverage comparable to a distributed R&D team at a fraction of the cost of internal hiring. These contributors work at foundational layers where technical innovation in the industry originates.
Direct grants create strong working relationships that passive sponsorships or third-party funding do not. Close collaboration with builders provides early visibility into where the technology is heading. This early insight is essential for meaningful innovation.
A grant program does not replace internal R&D, it extends outreach into upstream work that internal teams may not have capacity or specialization to pursue.
Operational risk is low. Established grant frameworks already exist within the Bitcoin ecosystem. Grants are structured as time bound agreements with independent contractors, avoiding employment or HR liabilities.
Oversight requirements are minimal and can be limited to quarterly updates and a single internal point of contact.
To reduce setup friction, you can reuse existing legal and compliance templates, drawing from the experience and documentation of Spiral, a subsidiary of Block, which has funded over 70 developers since 2018, as well as Bitshala, HRF, Maelstrom, OpenSats, Tether and Vinteum.
Your company can remain a downstream consumer of open source infrastructure or become an active participant in the foundations you depend on.
A FOSS support program reduces upstream risk, brings you closer to active development, and builds durable relationships with the people shaping the systems your business relies on.
For a budget comparable to a single hire, it expands your R&D surface area globally with minimal overhead while strengthening your position within the ecosystem.
Open source works because it is rooted in meritocracy, and the fastest way to kill it is to distort that.
The way to counter that is not less participation, but more.
More independent, economically rational sources of support, and more participants acting in their own self interest.
If your business runs on these protocols, you either pay to help steer the ship or you pay tenfold later to fix what breaks downstream. Excellent breakdown
Its not really an investment in the way businesses typically think of investing if there are no strings. It's more akin to trying to build healthy soil in which to grow your crops. You have not promised returns but if you only ever take or create a system of only one sided concerns eventually you and everyone in the area are gonna have big issues.
The 'Greater Israel' project proposes that military aggression is justified to achieve the allegedly God given boundaries of the state of Israel.
'Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has suggested that Israel is destined to expand to include Jordan, and even beyond, to parts of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and even Iraq. In a documentary film by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arte in 2024, Smotrich said “it is written that the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus.
This view has support in some parts of Israeli society. Israel’s incursions into Jordan and Syria has intensified international concerns that some actors in Israel are pursuing expansion into other countries...
In August 2025, Israeli prime minister https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Netanyahu said in an interview with Israeli TV channel i24News that he was on a "historic and spiritual mission" and that he is "very" attached to the vision of Greater Israel, which includes Palestinian areas and possibly also places that are part of Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon.'
Text:
Why is this a link to a tweet that is a link to a "article" on x?
my bad, x has horrible UX for articles.
All good.
It’s not a donation, it’s an insurance policy.
If your business runs on these protocols, you either pay to help steer the ship or you pay tenfold later to fix what breaks downstream. Excellent breakdown
Its not really an investment in the way businesses typically think of investing if there are no strings. It's more akin to trying to build healthy soil in which to grow your crops. You have not promised returns but if you only ever take or create a system of only one sided concerns eventually you and everyone in the area are gonna have big issues.
Is foss a boss knock off?
Nothing is guaranteed
https://twiiit.com/pavlenex/status/2049122238033531339
The 'Greater Israel' project proposes that military aggression is justified to achieve the allegedly God given boundaries of the state of Israel.
'Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has suggested that Israel is destined to expand to include Jordan, and even beyond, to parts of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and even Iraq.
In a documentary film by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arte in 2024, Smotrich said “it is written that the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus.
This view has support in some parts of Israeli society. Israel’s incursions into Jordan and Syria has intensified international concerns that some actors in Israel are pursuing expansion into other countries...
In August 2025, Israeli prime minister https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Netanyahu said in an interview with Israeli TV channel i24News that he was on a "historic and spiritual mission" and that he is "very" attached to the vision of Greater Israel, which includes Palestinian areas and possibly also places that are part of Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Israel
Thank you for your attention to this matter.