Why I'm Relaunching Simbiosi.org
I maintained Remmina from 2014 to 2023. A GTK remote desktop client, 150,000+ users, 8,000+ commits from 200+ contributors. CI/CD pipelines, releases, bug triage, PR reviews, community management. On top of a full-time job, unpaid, for 9 years.
Total donations over that period averaged about 1,000 CHF per year.
That’s not a complaint. I chose to do it. But it taught me something that no conference talk or blog post about “open source sustainability” ever could: the people doing this work are invisible, and the companies building billion-dollar products on top of it have zero structural incentive to support them.
Everyone knows, at some level. The system just makes it easy to take and hard to give back.
The beginning
In the early 2000s I started Simbiosi.org with an idea: build a flat company, entirely based on Free and Open Source software. The concept caught the attention of Richard Stallman, who pointed me to the Free Software Foundation Europe. I co-administered GNU Herds, a not-for-profit association that aimed to bring together people and businesses for whom Free Software was more than just a development model: a job matching platform for the Free Software community. Then the FSFE had more urgent battles, and those plans went on pause.
That was over 20 years ago. The idea stayed with me.
What changed
The Remmina years changed how I think about open source. At some point the frustration almost got to me: bug reports from companies deploying the software on hundreds of machines, zero contributions back, and the feeling that nobody cared. I was close to hating the whole ecosystem, which would have been the wrong conclusion. Instead I started paying attention to what was actually happening: studying the projects that managed to get funded vs. the ones that didn’t, reading the behavioral research, looking at the economics behind the gap.
The incentives are set up so that nobody has to think about it. The software is free, the license doesn’t require anything, and someone else is probably funding it. Except nobody is.
Mancur Olson described this in 1965 as the free rider problem. Darley and Latane called it the bystander effect. Nadia Eghbal, in her 2016 Ford Foundation report Roads and Bridges, applied it directly to open source. The behavioral research has understood this for decades. The open source community is still catching up.
What simbiosi.org is now
Simbiosi.org is back as what it was always meant to be: advocacy for the people doing the work, backed by data. Not a business, not a consultancy. A community project.
Right now it’s mostly me: 30 years in IT, from GNU projects to cloud governance, former FSFE associate, currently volunteering on FreeBSD CRA compliance. But this is meant to grow. Bring your expertise to:
- Case studies. Financial analysis of real foundations and projects. Public numbers, 990 filings, donor lists, behavioral research. Data, not opinion.
- Fundraising and UX. Donation page redesign, grant writing, behavioral research. Skills that help projects get funded.
- Policy and compliance. CRA analysis, regulatory impact, documentation. The EU is creating new obligations for open source stewards starting September 2026.
The first case study is on the FreeBSD Foundation. More coming.
Why “simbiosi”
Symbiosis. Two organisms that benefit from each other. That’s what open source should be: companies benefit from the software, maintainers benefit from the support. Right now, it’s closer to parasitism in too many cases. The value flows one way.
The name is a reminder of what we’re working toward.
What’s next
I’m starting with what I know best: real numbers, real analysis, real projects. If you’re a maintainer struggling with sustainability, or you work at a foundation trying to make the numbers work, I want to hear from you.