Announcing Our 2026 Open Source Contribution Fund Recipients
Each year, BC Libraries Co-op employees nominate the open source projects they use and benefit from — so we can acknowledge and support the people and teams behind them in our small but meaningful way through our Open Source Contribution Fund.
This year we are pleased to announce the following recipients:
- Ondřej Surý, the primary maintainer for PHP forward and back-ports on Ubuntu and Debian, which we make use of to get the versions we require on Ubuntu LTS
- The Composer team, who support maintenance work and feature development for Composer, the PHP dependency manager, and sponsor the operation of packagist.org, the public open-source package repository in use across many websites the Co-op supports
- The Kanboard project, the tool we currently use for project management in the Systems team
- The Drupal project, the content management system that powers NNELS
We are proud to help grow and give back to the open source ecosystem in which we believe strongly.
About the Open Source Contribution Fund
The BC Libraries Co-op has a deep commitment to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Our core service, Sitka, is built on the FOSS application Evergreen®, and we contribute code and resources to this project as much as possible, as well as to other projects whenever feasible.
The Co-op depends on hundreds of FOSS projects for daily operations — many of them critical yet severely under-resourced. An example of a consequence of this underfunding was the Heartbleed bug in the OpenSSL library, publicly revealed in March 2014. That software library, which secured traffic on hundreds of thousands of websites globally, was supported by just three part-time, unfunded volunteers. That event was one of the reasons this fund was created.
The Open Source Contribution Fund exists to support software development and the supporting activities (legal, travel, promotion) of the wider FOSS ecosystem. The benefits are mutual: our members and staff gain from a stronger, more robust ecosystem, and our participation benefits the wider community.