Wild billboards around the Bay call attention to tech companies free-loading off open source projects

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2024-10-28 19:00:07

Some slightly unsettling billboards and ads have recently popped up around the city. They feature phrases like “Chief Freeload Officer” and “Chief Excuse Officer” accompanied by unsubtle caricatures, including one of a creepy guy with dollar signs for eyes, and money flying out of his drooling mouth.

The billboards and ads, which you can see on Muni bus stops and buses, are part of a campaign from an initiative called the Open Source Pledge. The pledge encourages tech companies to give cash directly to the people who maintain the various free open source software projects that underpin many for-profit businesses. Pretty much every big tech company you could think of uses some type of open source software, including Apple, Google, and Facebook.

There are tens of millions of free and open source software projects, which make up 70-90% of today’s software solutions, according to a Linux Foundation report. These projects live on repositories like GitHub, Maven, and npm. Despite their enormous importance to digital infrastructure, a good chunk of widely used pieces of open source software are developed and maintained by a handful of people.