Spotify’s 2023 FOSS Fund: Four Projects Receive €100K

Spotify’s FOSS Fund is back for a second year, distributing €100,000 to independent open source projects that are essential to the company’s engineering work. Following an internal nomination process and review by the FOSS Fund committee, four projects have been selected to receive €25,000 each: AssertJ, Jdbi, Testcontainers, and Xiph.

The fund is designed to support projects that Spotify’s R&D teams rely on daily. Nominations were collected from engineers across the organization, and the committee narrowed the pool to a shortlist of 12 before making the final selection. The chosen projects are all independent and appear among Spotify’s thousands of internal dependencies.

“The recipients are all independent projects that are meaningful to Spotify’s tech stack and the work we do,” said Tyson Singer, Spotify’s Head of Technology and Platforms. “We chose projects that we believe can most benefit from our financial support, whether the funds are used for improving the codebase, fixing security vulnerabilities, or continuing the development of the projects as their maintainers see fit.”

This Year’s Recipients

  • AssertJ (25,000 EUR): A Java library that offers fluent, readable assertions for unit tests, making error messages clearer than those produced by plain JUnit. The library appears in 764 Spotify repositories containing production components.
  • Jdbi (25,000 EUR): A library that simplifies relational database access in Java. Artifacts from org.jdbi are used in 379 production repositories, and Spotify maintains internal utility libraries and JUnit 5 extensions built on top of it.
  • Testcontainers (25,000 EUR): A Java testing library that manages Docker containers during test runs. Nearly all of Spotify’s backend services use it, and it receives a larger award this year after taking home €13,000 in 2022.
  • Xiph (25,000 EUR): The nonprofit Xiph.org Foundation develops audio codecs and containers—including Ogg, Opus, Vorbis, and FLAC—that have been central to Spotify’s streaming stack since its earliest days. Xiph also received funding last year, with €19,000 from the 2022 fund.

Beyond the financial contribution, Spotify intends the fund to draw attention to the value of independent open source work. Singer encouraged others in the industry to recognize and support the projects they depend on: “For the broader open source ecosystem to be sustainable, we should all recognize the projects that are important to us and the greater tech community, and find ways to support them.”