One of the biggest reasons I fell in love with programming at a young age was because of...people. For years that exasperated my imposter syndrome. Everyone else I respected seemed to have this love of the problem, while I loved chatting with folks in IRC and creating. Sure, my perception was likely way off base, but still, I felt like an interloper in a space meant for someone else.
Getting involved in open source for the first time felt like the puzzle piece finally fit. It's about sharing and people, and taking part in a community effort. More often than not, particularly for a large project, humans are the tough thing to figure out, not the code itself. Turns out this is a good lesson that extends way beyond OSS.
Not to make this too much of a grandma's-backstory-before-just-giving-the-recipe situation, but my point is that open source is near and dear to my heart personally. That's why I felt a little attacked when I was having dinner with devtool friends, and Magnus accused us of being stingy and not supporting open source because we hadn't signed the pledge. In reality he kindly asked why we weren't on the pledge, and I felt like a dumbass because we already do contribute to open source with both dollars and time.
So, we're making it official, here's the pledge.
Mux is committing to the Open Source Pledge with at least $120k annually ($3k per full-time developer) to support the broader developer ecosystem. This is in addition to our ongoing role as corporate shepherd of Video.js, the web's most-used open source video player. One of our co-founders and the original creator of Video.js, Steve Heffernan, and four engineers are dedicated to contributing and building Video.js v10 (and onward).
Outside of Video.js, we're also contributing support to a wide range of tools that developers use to build applications these days. That includes projects like Astro, franz-go, Mediabunny, Elysia, sqlc, Tailwind, VideoLAN, Vite, Vue.js, Zod, SolidJS, XState, and Htmx.
We rely on some of these ourselves, but these projects help developers to build better web applications. When framework developers, tooling maintainers, and infrastructure projects have consistent support, the entire ecosystem benefits.
Our commitment in practice:
- Financial support: at least $120k annually through the Open Source Pledge to projects across the development stack
- Engineering commitment: 5 dedicated engineers building and maintaining Video.js, ensuring performant and composable video infrastructure for the web
- Continued community investment: we'll keep hosting and sponsoring community events, covering video hosting bills for dev educators, and more. If any of these apply to you and you want to chat, reach out. We've got a great event space in our office you can use.
If your company uses open source (you do), consider signing the pledge too, because the accountability the Open Source Pledge provides is important. It's a public commitment to continuous contributions rather than ad-hoc sponsorships. As both maintainers (through Video.js) and beneficiaries (using ecosystem tools) of open source, we understand sustainability from both sides.
If we have dinner, this time we'll bring the peer pressure.
