Kajal Sapkota

— On the schedule —

Who Pays for Open Source? A First-Party Answer from the OpenSSL Corporation

This session uses OpenSSL's own data to answer a question usually argued in the abstract: who actually pays for open source? It challenges the image of open source as volunteer labor, drawing on the project's data, including contributor statistics dating back to 1998, participation records from the OpenSSL Communities platform, and download figures that reveal a user base exponentially larger than the contributor base. The picture that emerges: OpenSSL is built and steered overwhelmingly by people paid by companies that need it to work, while the project can see corporate involvement only through sponsorships, support contracts, and contributor agreements. Far more investment, including full-time engineering teams at companies OpenSSL has never invoiced, goes unmeasured. The session closes with the sustainability question: what moves companies from free use to paid support, and how growing regulatory expectations are changing that conversation. Attendees will learn: • Who really builds, steers, and uses OpenSSL, grounded in the project's data • Why the visible funding channels capture only a fraction of real corporate investment • What actually moves organizations from free use to paid support • A more honest framing for sustainability, whether they maintain a project or fund one