Funding the open-source projects DC1 runs on

Research note, November 2, 2026, Alexander Grabowski (B4L). Sources retrieved November 2, 2026; figures cited, our estimates marked.

This note covers a commitment to set aside part of DC1's earnings for the open-source projects its servers, network and services run on. It names the projects, says how each is kept and paid for today, proposes a rule for how much to give, splits the money among the projects and Thai open-source work, values what can be given in kind, and explains how a Thai company can pay foreign projects within Thai tax law. B4L (buildfor.life) prepared it as consultant; the investor's operating company (working name DC1 Cloud) would make every payment and decide every grant. The figures come from model/foss_funding.py, with results in model/foss_funding_results.md, which reads its revenue cases from the study's other models and the calculator. Money is in THB, with USD in parentheses at 33 THB per USD, the B4L planning rate, and euro amounts at the ECB rate of 37.821 THB per EUR.[494]

In short

• DC1 is designed to run almost entirely on open-source software, from NixOS, Incus and Ceph to SONiC, FRR, vLLM and PostgreSQL (the open stack). Several of these projects rest on very few people or very little money: Incus runs on one person's company, the NixOS Foundation spent EUR 118,917 in 2025 against EUR 93,897 of revenue, and FRR's test infrastructure is run by a non-profit with three employees.[1590][1591][1592]
• We recommend that the operating company give in cash, every year, the larger of USD 2,000 per full-time developer, the floor of the Open Source Pledge, and 0.5% of revenue.[1593] At the start (two server racks in a rented Bangkok rack and one agent-server pod) the floor binds and the pool is 198,000 THB (USD 6,000) a year; in the 2 MW case it grows to 5.1 million THB (USD 155,000) a year from year 3 (our estimate).
• At full build that is about USD 15,500 per developer, in the upper range of the 37 Pledge members, who give USD 2,000 to 19,977 per developer with a median of USD 3,704 (computed).[1594] Over the 2 MW case's ten years the giving has a present value of 28.9 million THB at 10%, 0.74% of the case's upfront cost (our estimate).
• A small pool goes to the thinly funded core: the NixOS Foundation, Incus, nix-community, FRR, vLLM and Thai projects. A large pool adds foundation memberships (Linux Foundation, SONiC, Ceph, PyTorch, PostgreSQL) for about 1.0 million THB a year and keeps 20% for Thai open source (our design).
• Gifts in kind come on top and are reported separately, because the Pledge counts only cash: a NixOS mirror for Thailand, which has none today, build servers from unsold stock, GPU time for Thai open models and 10% of the platform engineers' time upstream, together worth 2.9 to 4.2 million THB a year at the study's cost (our estimate).[1595][1596]
• A gift to a foreign foundation is not deductible in Thailand, because only listed Thai recipients qualify, while a membership or sponsorship with a business return is an ordinary expense (our reading, to be confirmed by a ruling).[1597][1598] During DC1's 8-year BOI tax holiday the difference costs almost nothing.[18][135]

Why a data center should pay for its software

Open-source software is worth far more to its users than it cost to write. A Harvard Business School paper puts the supply-side value of widely used open-source software at USD 4.15 billion and its demand-side value at USD 8.8 trillion, and finds that firms would spend 3.5 times more on software without it.[1599] The same paper finds that 96% of the demand-side value comes from 5% of the developers, so a few people carry most of the weight. In Tidelift's 2024 survey, 60% of maintainers were still not paid for their work, and 60% had quit or considered quitting.[1600]

The risk is concrete. In March 2024 the upstream xz compression library was found to carry a backdoor in release tarballs signed by a co-maintainer, and the OpenSSF and OpenJS foundations concluded that "ensuring our maintainers are well supported is the primary deterrent we have" against such takeovers.[1601][1602][1603] The US Cyber Safety Review Board traced the Log4j crisis to risks "unique to the thinly-resourced, volunteer-based open source community".[1604]

DC1's own base layer shows the strain. Equinix Metal shut down on June 30, 2026, which ended its free build machines for NixOS; the NixOS infrastructure team had to propose renting six Hetzner builders for EUR 1,500 a month plus EUR 600 of setup.[1605][1606] In August 2026 the Nixpkgs core team disbanded, saying that stepping down was necessary for its members' health, after only one person had applied to join it.[1607] The design picks open software because it removes per-switch, per-socket and per-seat licenses and keeps the investor free to change vendors. A business that takes that saving can afford to return part of it to the people who make it possible.

What DC1 runs on, and how each project is paid for

The stack comes from the open stack, the first data center, hosting and agent servers, the rescue system and the camera platform. The table groups it by who keeps each project and whether money can reach it.

Three groups emerge from the table. Projects in a foundation (Ceph, SONiC, Prometheus, vLLM, PostgreSQL) take money through memberships and sponsorships with published fees. Projects kept by one person, a small company or a small non-profit (Incus, nix-community, FRR, iPXE, pgvector, thingino, PyThaiNLP) need money most, and some of them have no way to receive it yet. Projects kept by a company that sells an enterprise edition (Grafana, NetBox, VictoriaMetrics, Bareos, OPNsense, FastNetMon, Open WebUI) are best supported by buying that edition where DC1 needs it, which is a purchase in the operating budget and is kept out of the giving pool.

How much to give

Benchmarks

The Open Source Pledge sets the most widely used norm: companies pay at least USD 2,000 a year per full-time developer on staff to maintainers or foundations of their choice, only cash counts, and projects the company itself controls are excluded.[1593] Members publish a yearly post with the year, their developer count, the total paid and a breakdown by recipient.[1638] Its members paid USD 4,595,963 in the past year.[1594] Sentry gave USD 1,000,000 in 2026, and Zerodha, an Indian broker, gave over USD 823,281 in 2025, of which about USD 100,000 went to India's own FOSS United Foundation.[1639][1640] Zerodha's FLOSS/fund commits USD 1 million a year in grants of USD 10,000 to 100,000 per project.[1641]

Other programs tie the amount to the company's results. The French Copie Publique program sets a yearly envelope by a formula each company adopts from its annual accounts, and Pledge 1% lets companies choose a share of profit, revenue, equity, product or staff time.[1642][1643]

The rule we recommend

We recommend that each year the operating company give in cash the larger of two amounts: USD 2,000 per full-time developer, the Pledge floor, and 0.5% of revenue (our design). The floor applies from the first year of sales, profitable or not, so the commitment holds while the business is young. The share of revenue takes over as the business grows. We tie it to revenue because revenue is known every month and is not moved by depreciation or by how the plant is financed, while DC1's profit will be dominated by depreciation for years.

The revenue of the first two cases comes from the server fleets at 70% sold in VPS and dedicated servers and one pod of agent-server customers from hosting and agent servers. The 2 MW case is the calculator's preset with servers in hall B at its middle settings, read on November 2, 2026. Developers are the platform and customer engineers of each case, from 3 at the start to 10 at full build (the first data center, staff table). All of these figures are our estimates.

At full build the rule gives about USD 15,500 per developer, which is twice Sentry's USD 7,576 and below the highest Pledge member's USD 19,977.[1594] The size is set by DC1's revenue per engineer, which a GPU business makes large, and it is large beside the projects' budgets: 5.1 million THB a year is slightly more than the NixOS Foundation spent in all of 2025 (our calculation). A share of 0.25% would halve the pool to 2.6 million THB a year and 1% would double it to 10.2 million THB (our estimate).

What it costs the investor

Over the 2 MW case's ten years the giving adds up to 48.3 million THB, with a present value of 28.9 million THB at a 10% discount rate, or 0.74% of the case's upfront cost of 3.91 billion THB (our estimate). The tax effect is small, because a promoted data center outside the EEC with a PUE of 1.3 or lower pays no corporate income tax for 8 years.[18][135]

The open stack saves much more than that. NVIDIA AI Enterprise, which the open serving stack (vLLM, SGLang, LiteLLM) makes optional, lists at USD 4,500 (148,500 THB) per GPU a year.[464] For the 864 GPUs of the calculator's 2 MW case, that would be 128.3 million THB a year, of which the full-build pool is 4.0% (our calculation). White-box switches with SONiC save about 11 million THB per MW once, against NVIDIA's switches at list prices (the open stack, our estimate).

Who receives the money

We weigh three things when we split the pool (our judgment). The first is how much DC1 depends on the project: whether a security flaw or an abandoned release would stop the servers, the network or a product. The second is how thin its funding is: one maintainer, a deficit, or no company behind it. The third is whether money can reach it at all. Purchases of enterprise editions stay outside the pool, and projects that cannot accept money get code, testing or hosting instead.

A small pool for the first years

While the pool is under about 1 million THB a year, splitting it among twenty projects would leave each a token. The model concentrates it on the core that DC1 cannot run without and that has the least money behind it (our design).

Channels take their share before the money arrives. GitHub Sponsors charges organizations up to 6%, or 3% when they pay by invoice of at least USD 5,000.[1644][1645] Open Source Collective, which holds vLLM's and OpenIPC's money, keeps 10%, and Open Source Europe, which holds nix-community's, keeps 10% of bank transfers.[1646][1647] An outward SWIFT transfer from SCB costs 550 THB.[1648] At growth about 357,000 of the 373,508 THB reaches the projects (our estimate).

A large pool for the 2 MW case

At 5.1 million THB a year the pool can also pay for memberships, which fund the foundations' shared work; Ceph's members, for example, pool money for test infrastructure, documentation, events and community programs.[1649] For a company of DC1's planned 36 to 44 staff, Linux Foundation Silver costs USD 5,000 a year, and SONiC's charter requires it of every member.[1651][1650] SONiC General costs USD 6,000 and Ceph Silver USD 10,000.[1618][1617] PyTorch Foundation Silver, the level for vLLM's home, costs USD 5,000, and so does PostgreSQL's Supporter level.[1652][1628] Together they come to USD 31,000 (1.02 million THB) a year.

The NixOS Foundation's share, about 920,000 THB (USD 27,876), would be about a fifth of its 2025 spending and would put the operating company among its larger sponsors (our calculation). The Thai share follows Zerodha's example of keeping part of the money at home.[1640] Thailand has few channels for it today. PyThaiNLP can receive money only through its leads, PyCon Thailand puts its sponsorship back into future events, and the new Thai open-source association TOSF says it will offer fiscal sponsorship for Thai projects, though its site lists no members yet.[1653][1654][1655] The FOSSASIA Summit is held in Bangkok each March, and FOSSASIA PGDay returns to Bangkok on March 9, 2027.[1656][1657]

Projects that cannot take money yet

Kanidm's maintainers wrote in September 2026 that their employment forbids other income, so DC1 would help it with code, testing and hosting.[1623] pgvector and clan.lol have no channel that we found, and thingino asks for cameras rather than cash.[1612][1635] The reserve in the large pool holds their share until a channel opens.

Giving in kind

A data center can give what software projects find hardest to buy: machines, bandwidth and GPU time. Fastly's CDN serves the NixOS binary cache through its open-source program, and AWS renewed its sponsorship of the cache's storage in September 2026.[1658][1609] Oregon State University's Open Source Lab shows what a whole program can look like, with OpenStack clusters, Ceph storage and mirrors carrying about 100 projects over 60 Gbps.[1659] We propose four gifts for the full build, valued at the study's own cost and reported apart from the cash pool (our design and estimate).

Thailand has seven official Ubuntu mirrors, the largest at Khon Kaen University with 100 Gbps, and four Debian mirrors.[1595][1660] None of the Thai mirrors we checked carries NixOS.[1596][1661] The NixOS cache holds 636 TB and serves 892 TB a week, so DC1 would not copy it whole; a caching proxy keeps what Thai users fetch.[1609] OpenThai already receives GPU time from sponsors for its registered volunteers, LMSYS accepts GPUs and credits for SGLang, and vLLM lists more than a dozen compute sponsors.[1662][1631][1663]

Build servers are worth giving only from stock that is not sold. NixOS's plan to rent six Hetzner builders came to about 703,000 THB in its first year, while two of DC1's 512 GB servers cost 1.05 to 1.58 million THB a year at the study's cost (our calculation). A server bought only to be given away is worth less to a project than the same money in cash. In-kind gifts also need a term. When Equinix Metal closed and LogicBlox ended its sponsorship of the NixOS cache in 2023, the projects had to find money at short notice.[1605][1664] We would commit each gift for three years, with twelve months' notice before it ends (our judgment).

Engineering time does not count toward the Pledge, which excludes employed maintainers, but it is how OpenBao earns corporate seats on its technical committee and the only way to help Kanidm.[1593][1625] A rule that every fix DC1's engineers make goes upstream, with no private patches kept, costs little and keeps the fleet close to the released code (our judgment).

Paying from Thailand

This section is our reading of Thai tax law and not legal advice. A Thai tax adviser should confirm each type of payment, ideally with a private ruling from the Revenue Department.

A charity can be designated only if it spends for public benefit in Thailand and nowhere else, so foreign foundations cannot qualify.[1673] With the corporate tax rate at 20%, a deductible sponsorship would cost about 80% of its face value in a taxable year, but DC1 expects 8 tax-free years under its BOI promotion, so in practice every form of giving costs its face value (our reading).[1667][18][135]

The BOI's new rules point local giving in a useful direction. A promoted data center must complete a plan of benefits for Thailand, covering training, joint courses with educational institutions and research with Thai people or institutions in fields such as AI and high-performance computing, before it can use its tax exemption.[1674] In PwC's summary, support for academic and research institutions counts at 200% toward the BOI's merit for extra years of exemption.[1544] GPU time and engineering time for Thai universities and Thai open models could serve both purposes, while gifts to foreign foundations cannot; the BOI would have to confirm what it accepts (our reading).

Transfers abroad need little paperwork at these sizes. The Bank of Thailand's guideline of December 1, 2025 asks for supporting documents only from USD 200,000 for customers who have not passed their bank's business verification, although SCB's page still names USD 50,000.[1675][1648] Paying twice a year keeps the bank charges and the paperwork down. Zerodha's experience is a warning about timing: of USD 1 million allocated through FLOSS/fund for 2025, USD 205,000 had been paid out by December 15, with the rest still in process.[1640]

Running the program

A yearly inventory

Most DC1 machines are built from NixOS configurations (the Grace-based GPU racks run Ubuntu), so the full list of packages on them can be generated from the configurations themselves (our reading). Package-manager tools such as thanks.dev, which splits a donation by dependency depth at (1/2)^n per level, cannot see system software like the kernel, QEMU, Ceph or FRR.[1676] The OpenSSF Criticality Score helps rank projects without package graphs, such as those written in C.[1677] Microsoft's 2024 round, which sponsored 175 entities among its dependencies, found that the lack of a GitHub Sponsors profile ruled out more projects than license problems did, which is why the reserve exists.[1678]

Who decides

We suggest a small committee of the platform lead, the finance lead and one engineer elected by the staff, which takes nominations from all staff and decides once a year (our design). Indeed's employee-voted fund paid USD 10,000 a month to a project chosen by vote, and its own review found that a vote does not show which projects most need money.[1679] The committee therefore keeps the three tests above and uses staff nominations to find projects the inventory misses.

Reporting

The operating company should join the Open Source Pledge and publish its yearly report: the year, the developer count, the total paid and the amount per recipient, with the in-kind gifts listed separately.[1638] Open Collective and the foundations publish what they receive, so each line of the report can be checked against the recipient's own page. Projects that want to be found can publish a funding.json manifest, the format FLOSS/fund uses to take applications.[1680][1641]

What this means for the investor

What follows is our judgment.

The giving is small beside what the open stack saves. At full build 5.1 million THB a year is 4.0% of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise list price for the same GPUs, and its present value over ten years is under 1% of the upfront cost. It buys a real reduction in risk, because it pays the few people who keep the base layer of the business secure and maintained.

The floor is the part to promise publicly from the first year. It costs 198,000 THB at the start, it puts the company in a known program with a public report, and it does not depend on profit. The share of revenue is the part the board should set with the business plan: 0.5% gives the projects a meaningful sum without changing the case, and 0.25% would still place the company above the Pledge median.

The Thai share and the gifts in kind do more for the investor in Thailand than cash abroad. A mirror that Thailand lacks, GPU time for Thai models and engineers who work upstream build a reputation among the engineers the company wants to hire, and they may count toward the BOI's benefit plan. They should come from capacity that is not sold, under a written term, so that no project is left stranded when the capacity is needed.

Payments to foreign projects should take the form of memberships or sponsorships where possible, booked as business expenses with their documents on file, and a tax adviser should confirm the treatment once before the first payment.

Open questions