Django-rest-framework: Mozilla Award - A Retrospective

[tomchristie]

Righty - I'm going to work this into a pull request shortly, but want to start getting it up for review quickly.

We need to draw up a post giving a retrospect of the impact that the MOSS award has had on the project. This is super important, as it will help Mozilla continue to make the business case for their award program, which has a huge knock-on effect on other open source projects.

Here's what I've got so far. Will be working on this more over the rest of the day and weekend...

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Mozilla Award - A Retrospective.

Background

In summer 2016 the Django REST framework project was awarded $50,000 from Mozilla, through its ongoing MOSS program.

The project was already well-established, but the scope of the framework and the size of our userbase meant that it was becoming unsustainable to continue to push the project forward without a significant amount of funded time being made available.

Our proposal included adding client libraries, improving support for API schema generation, and improved integration with WebSockets, for realtime API endpoints.

Work to date

Over 2016 and 2017 the award has helped fund time from Tom Christie, Anna Ossowski, and Carlton Gibson. Together with the project's other contributors, we've been able to make a series of major releases from 3.4 through to 3.7.

Major functionality we've added in that period has included:

• Python client library.
• JavaScript client library.
• Command line client.
• Integrated schema support. (Swagger, RAML, CoreJSON)
• New test client.
• Interactive API documentation.

There has also been work not on REST framework itself, but in the surrounding ecosystem.

Tom has been able to help navigate the "Simplified URL routing syntax" feature into Django 2.0, alongside a number of other contributors.

There has been work around async and realtime, although not yet directly in REST framework itself. This has included developing a new Python webserver, with an ASGI-like asyncio interface, as well as significant exploratory work towards a new API framework.

Over the last 18 months we've been closing incoming issues and pull requests at a sustained rate of around 80 issues/month.

We've gone from standing at around 210 open issues and pull requests at the start of the period, to being at around 110 to date.

Sustainability

The Mozilla Award has also been a foundational part of allowing us to launch an ongoing, sustainable business model behind the project. Having a significant amount of runway funding meant that Tom Christie was in a position to leave full-time employment, and launch a sponsorship model for funding REST framework.

The result of this is that although the MOSS funding is now exhausted, the project still has money in the bank, and a decent amount of monthly recurring revenue.

We're aiming to keep our finances transparent through our monthly reports.

As a rough guide we are currently at around £5,500 monthly recurring revenue. Against this Tom draws a salary of £60k/year. Together with short amounts of freelancing we've also been in a position to take on freelance work from both Anna Ossowski (Fundraising & Operations), and Carlton Gibson (Triage & Feature Work).

Impact

There are now around 100 third party packages available for use with REST framework, and we've had over 700 contributors to date.

We'd currently estimate something like 100,000 monthly active developers working with the framework, supporting perhaps some tens of thousands of companies, and certainly impacting many millions of end-users.

A project supporting this many developers and companies cannot realistically operate without dedicated working hours towards its support. We wouldn't be in such a strong position without the MOSS award giving us enough runway to be able to launch our sponsorship model.

What's next

[TODO]

[TODO - Call to action]

[auvipy]

thanks for your efforts tom. django rest framework is the best rest framework I have ever used in any language.

[auvipy]

If you could complete this one, that might help more sponsors/donors for future funding & sustainability of the project. part of it could include the ability to work on foundational async projects like httpx/starlette etc beside DRF IMHO.