Posts tagged "funding" | Rust Blog

How to fund Rust contributors

2026-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

TLDR:

To fund general maintenance, donate to the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund or sponsor the RustNL Maintainers Team

To fund specific features and improvements, sponsor fundable Rust Project Goals

To fund individual contributors, donate to their GitHub Sponsors accounts

There is always so much to do in the Rust Project! New features to implement, bugs to fix, performance optimizations to make, issues to triage… It takes a lot of work to keep our high bar of quality while also shipping new features and improvements. And the workload keeps increasing with the continuous growth of Rust adoption.

As is unfortunately common in open source projects, a large fraction of that work is currently done by volunteers. That causes various issues, such as people burning out or complex features taking many years to ship.

Unsurprisingly, one of the best ways to help improve that is to get more people who work on Rust funded! This year, several funding initiatives started ramping up, and we already experience many positive effects. They helped us improve the maintenance status of critical Rust projects and make significant progress on several long-awaited features, such as allocators, the never type, the next trait solver or the Polonius borrow checker. However, only a fraction of people working on Rust are currently funded for their work.

We know that there are Rust users, both individuals and companies, who would like to help improve Rust by funding it, but it might not always be obvious how exactly to do that. This post thus provides suggestions on how you can support the development of Rust in three ways.

If you're unsure which option fits, or would like to discuss funding on behalf of your company, please contact the Funding team.

Fund general maintenance

Maintenance is a continuous process required to keep Rust (or any software project for that matter) working. It consists of two main activities. The first is general housekeeping, such as ensuring that Continuous Integration works, dependencies are kept up-to-date and issues, bugs and security incidents are promptly triaged and resolved. The second is performing refactorings and code reviews, which ensures that the codebase will be able to evolve and continuously ship new features, without accruing extensive technical debt.

Having quality maintenance is crucial for the long-term health of Rust, yet it is typically very difficult to find funding for it; funders often want to sponsor specific new features, rather than just "keeping the lights on". However, without sufficient maintenance, it becomes much more difficult, and much slower, to ship new features. Improving the maintenance of Rust thus also helps us ship features and improvements faster, though the effects are sometimes only observable over longer periods of time.

Funding maintenance is a great choice if you want to let us decide how best to improve Rust. The Rust Funding team continuously looks for Rust teams and projects that require help with their maintenance efforts, and allocates available funds to Rust maintainers who could help improve the situation.

To fund Rust maintainers, consider donating to the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund or sponsoring the RustNL Maintainers Team.

Fund specific features and improvements

There are always many Rust improvements and new features that are in progress. We track some of those initiatives through Rust Project Goals. Each Goal describes a specific improvement to Rust: what it is, who is going to develop and drive it forward and which Rust teams are willing to help reviewing and maintaining it.

Some of those Goals are looking for funding. Either to help their owner dedicate time and focus to push the given feature forward, or to fund maintainers who will perform refactorings necessary to unblock that feature and review its implementation. Often funding is required for both. When a Goal is properly funded, the probability that it will achieve its milestones is much higher, which then translates in the given improvement being shipped sooner to Rust users.

Funding Project Goals is a great choice if you want to help push forward specific Rust features or Rust toolchain improvements that will benefit you or your company.

To fund contributors working on Project Goals, consider taking a look at Goals that need funding and reaching out to their funding contact. If in doubt how to proceed, reach out to the Rust Funding team.

Fund individual contributors

There are hundreds of people in the Rust Project who continuously work on improving Rust. Some of them have personal fundraising profiles (e.g. on GitHub Sponsors), which allows you to support them directly.

There might be various reasons for supporting a specific person. Maybe they are maintaining a crate that you love to use, maybe you like reading their blog posts, or maybe you are simply a fan of the work that they do. Whatever the reason, we are sure that they would appreciate your support!

Funding individual contributors is a great choice if you want to directly support Rust contributors whose work you appreciate.

To fund individual Rust contributors, check out their GitHub profile or personal website to see what options there are for supporting them. You can also examine our list of Rust Project members who can be supported through GitHub Sponsors^[1].

Conclusion

We hope that this post is useful to anyone who would potentially like to invest funds into making Rust better. You can also find a shortened version of the "how to fund Rust guide" at the Funding page of the Rust website, or check out a RustConf 2026 talk by Niko Matsakis about how Project Goals and their funding works.

If you are a company looking to fund the development of Rust, consider joining the Rust Commercial Network. Joining the network is free, and Rust Foundation membership is not required. It can help you find opportunities for funding improvements in specific areas related to Rust usage (e.g. user interfaces, language interop, supply chain security, etc.) and collaborate on funding Rust development with other companies.

There are of course other ways of helping Rust other than donating funds. For example, you can check out Project Goals that are looking for contributors or more generally check our contributor onboarding guide. Companies can also help by giving employees paid time to contribute upstream, or by hiring Rust contributors to do that work. One possible model is the Engineer in Residence role, that was recently established in the Rust Foundation.

Note that this list is not exhaustive; there are some Project members who accept donations through GitHub Sponsors (or another fundraising platform), but did not opt into being listed on this page. ↩

Announcing a Maintainer in Residence: Scott Schafer for the Cargo team

2026-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

At the end of August, we announced our first Maintainers in Residence, Rust Project contributors who are funded for their upstream contributions and maintenance work from the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund (RFMF). Since then, the Rust Leadership Council has dedicated more funds from its Project Priorities budget to RFMF, and together with AWS also providing additional funds, this allowed us to open a new full-time Maintainer in Residence (MiR) position to support the Cargo team. We would like to thank the Rust Leadership Council, AWS, and also the Rust Foundation for providing us with this opportunity! If you would like to help us hire more maintainers to improve Rust, consider donating to RFMF.

This post explains why we chose to support the Cargo team specifically, and introduces Scott Schafer, the new Cargo Maintainer in Residence.

Why Cargo?

The new MiR full-time position is dedicated to helping with the maintenance of Cargo, our build system and package manager. The Cargo project is deeply involved in many new Rust features, improvements, and Project Goals. Combined with its cross-cutting nature, where it has to support many different use-cases and integrate with several other tools, it takes a lot of work just to keep up with its maintenance needs, let alone support so many feature requests and proposed changes.

Because of that, the Cargo team has sometimes struggled with meeting its maintenance demands. You might remember that for several years, it actually held a feature freeze, to reduce Cargo's internal tech debt, perform necessary refactorings, go through the issue and pull request backlog, and come up with scalable internal development and design processes, so that they could eventually go back to even thinking about adding new features.

Recently, some changes occurred within the team, which made it more difficult for them to meet their maintenance baseline. Some members of the team left, while others lost their dedicated funding for working on Cargo maintenance and had to scale down their involvement. The Funding team thus considered it very important to support this team, given that we had an opportunity to do so. And thus we decided to hire a full-time maintainer to work on Cargo for (at least) the next 12 months.

Even though we know that a single full-time maintainer will not completely solve the maintenance struggles of the Cargo team, we hope that it will improve the situation, and provide a bit of a relief for the team.

Introducing Scott Schafer

We are very happy to welcome Scott Schafer (@muscraft) into the Maintainer in Residence role! Scott has joined the Cargo team three years ago, and apart from working on Cargo, he is also the lead of the Rust Docker team, which prepares official Docker images for every Rust version.

Apart from working on general maintenance of Cargo, Scott has implemented Cargo's Workspace inheritance feature, and has also spearheaded a complex multi-year effort to switch the rendering of diagnostics in the Rust compiler to use the annotate-snippets crate. This effort has been completed in the Rust 1.93.0 release. Thanks to it, the same diagnostics interface can now be shared between the compiler and Cargo (and also other tools), which amongst other things unblocked further development of the Cargo linting system, which has now been stabilized and will ship in the Rust 1.100.0 release.

Everyone we talked about was very excited about Scott becoming a Cargo Maintainer in Residence, and we share that feeling. We wish Scott all the best in his new role, and we are very happy that we can support his maintenance work.

Here is what Scott thinks about it:

I am incredibly excited to work on Cargo full-time! There have been so many things that I wish I could've worked on over the years, that I will now be able to get to. I hope that my efforts will bring Cargo into a more maintainable state.

Conclusion

We are incredibly happy that we keep getting more funds for the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund, which allows us to support Rust Project contributors. The funding team will be working with the supported maintainers, and also the funders, to ensure that they are all happy with the arrangement, so that we can secure stable funding for Rust maintenance for years to come.

If you would like to help us support more Rust maintainers, consider donating to RFMF!

Announcing our first Maintainers in Residence

2026-08-26T00:00:00+00:00

We are very happy to announce the Rust Project's first round of Maintainers in Residence: Gen Li (@rami3l), Chris Denton (@ChrisDenton), Alejandra González (@blyxyas), León Liehr (@fmease), and Maintainer Grant recipients: Jason Newcomb (@Jarcho) and Jonas Böttiger (@joboet). These contributors will be funded for their rust-lang maintenance activities for (at least) the following 12 months!

The funding of the Maintainer in Residence (MiR) and Maintainer Grantee roles is possible thanks to generous donations to the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund (RFMF) from Google, AWS, OpenAI, the Rust Project Leadership Council and also individual sponsors. We also want to thank the people who advocated for maintainer funding within their companies; Tyler Mandry from Google, Niko Matsakis and Jess Izen from AWS and Predrag Gruevski from OpenAI, and also the whole Rust Leadership Council and our funding advisors. If you would like to help us support even more Rust contributors, consider donating to RFMF.

The Rust Foundation has published a press release and a blog post, where you can learn more about the sponsors and the supported contributors.

Read more below to learn about the MiR program, how we chose the funded contributors, and of course who they are!

Background

The Maintainer in Residence program, established in RFC 3931, is designed to provide stable financial support for Rust contributors, so that they can truly focus on crucial maintenance activities. Currently, there are three categories of support that we offer:

Full-time MiR: funded for 5 days/week of Rust Project work
Half-time MiR: funded for ~2.5 days/week of Rust Project work
Maintainer Grant: funded for ~1 day/week of Rust Project work

Funding for this program comes from the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund, which was launched recently, and the whole program is managed by the Rust Funding team.

When deciding who to fund, we took a systematic approach. First, we looked at Rust teams to understand their maintenance baseline (the smallest number of maintainers they need to ensure a healthy long-term status of the given project or repository), and how far they currently are from that baseline. From there, we identified and prioritized Rust teams who were both critically underfunded, and have a high impact on the language and its users. These teams (in no particular order) were rustdoc, rustup, cargo, compiler, libs, clippy, rustfmt, rust analyzer and mods.

The next step was pairing these teams with maintainers looking for funding. And it turns out that finding such maintainers for some teams turned out to be much more difficult than we originally assumed! For example, some maintainers are already employed, some do not want to be funded, and while we did our best to promote our funding efforts, not everyone looking for funding actually asked us for it. We also realized that some teams on our list have essentially no active members, which makes it tricky to onboard new contributors, even if they would like to help out.

In the end, we decided to start by supporting six contributors, who will help maintain several critical Rust projects and teams and who could start immediately. However, we are not stopping there. Our funding efforts are ongoing, so stay tuned for more MiR announcements in the near future! If you would like to learn more about our process, check out our recent post.

And now, without further ado, let's meet our newly funded maintainers!

Gen Li (@rami3l)

Gen Li (@rami3l) is a full-time MiR focusing on Rustup.

He has been a Rustup team member since 2023 and its lead since 2025. He deeply cares about the facets of Rust that many might have taken for granted, and embodies all attributes we were looking for in a MiR: he wants to take on complex issues, continue mentoring, and work on important Rustup features, among many other things.

Turning volunteering into an actual job has really been an empowering experience so far! I finally have the bandwidth to take a careful look at my inbox and can actually read each message without the fear of missing crucial details while rushing prompt replies, which has really helped me retain the essential compassion as a maintainer. I also get to interact with regular contributors a lot more often. Finally, I can't wait to see what I can come up with in terms of Project Goals :)

Chris Denton (@ChrisDenton)

Chris Denton (@ChrisDenton) is a half-time MiR focusing on the standard library, compiler, Rustup and anything Windows-related.

For the past five years Chris has been bringing his deep knowledge of Windows to help Rust sustain and improve its great cross-platform support. He will be unblocking other contributors in various Windows use cases, performing refactoring and code reviews and implementing new features across several areas of the Project.

Even though it is still early days, I'm feeling pretty optimistic about the health of the Rust Project going forward, thanks to the recent funding efforts.

Alejandra González (@blyxyas)

Alejandra González (@blyxyas) is a half-time MiR focusing on Clippy.

She is a Clippy team member always keen on improving performance and helping new contributors. She will focus on making Clippy faster and also reviewing its pull requests, to help get the ~300 pull request backlog down. Additionally, she is excited to mentor people from the Rust for Linux project to work on Clippy, and fine tune the open peer review system that Clippy started using earlier this year.

Funding is the system that helps me pour my heart into a project without worrying about making ends meet. Having those needs met is a game-changer and boosts my productivity. One of the areas where I want to focus my efforts is mentoring new contributors. If new people coming is the lifeblood of a project, I want to be the cardiologist!

León Liehr (@fmease)

León Liehr (@fmease) is a half-time MiR focusing on rustdoc and the compiler.

He is a member of the rustdoc and compiler teams, who is usually working on the Rust type system or issues related to parsing. He will continue working on complex features that he started a few years ago, and also focus on general maintenance, code reviews, refactoring and mentoring.

Being funded to work on Rust means I can sustainably focus my time and energy on a project I call a passion of mine.

Jonas Böttiger (@joboet)

Jonas Böttiger (@joboet) is a maintainer grantee focusing on the standard library.

He is a musicology student from Germany. When he is not playing the Cello or reading about Fanny Hensel, he applies his research skills to ensure that programs written in Rust run quickly and soundly on all platforms, no matter how quirky the operating system may be. He loves helping contributors write excellent code that they can be proud of; and considers it to be just as much fun as writing it himself.

Getting funding for my work is a dream come true. It will allow me to continue doing the thing I love instead of worrying about whether I should rather invest all that time in a money-earning job with much less positive impact on the world around me.

Jason Newcomb (@Jarcho)

Jason Newcomb (@Jarcho) is a maintainer grantee focusing on Clippy.

He is primarily working on fixing bugs and making it easier to develop and contribute to Clippy. He is also focusing on making the review process as smooth as possible.

Being funded allows me to work on something I care about and want to work on instead of what will get me paid. I'm looking forward to seeing how this will impact Clippy and the Rust project in general.

Conclusion

The contributors presented above will be funded for the next 12 months, though of course we hope that we will be able to extend their support going further, as this program is designed to be for long-term stable maintenance funding. We are very excited about them; each one of them has been with the Project for years, and we are very glad that we can support their maintenance work! All of them have already signed their contracts, so they are already being funded as we speak.

While there are many other Rust contributors who are doing awesome work, and who would also deserve to get proper funding for it, we think that this is a great start. We hope that the awesome work done by the funded maintainers will allow us to promote this program, so that we can fund even more Rust contributors!

We would like to once again sincerely thank everyone who made this possible, especially our sponsors. If you would like to help us fund more maintainers, consider donating to RFMF. You can also sponsor individual Rust contributors directly.

Funding team progress update — July 2026

2026-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

Hi all! This is an update from the funding team. Established by the leadership council, the funding team is tasked with administering the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund. Per RFC #3931, our initial focus has been on establishing the Maintainer in Residence (MiR) program. The goal of the MiR program is to offer a long-term, stable option to support people doing maintenance work.

While RFC #3931 laid out the high-level structure of the program, going from the "idea" of a Maintainer in Residence program to an actual functioning entity involves a lot of small decisions. This post covers the questions we've been discussing. For some of those questions, we have preliminary decisions, for others we are still deliberating. In any case, we welcome your input.

Funding total

We have so far received generous donations totaling $350K. We'll go into details on the sponsors when we announce our first Maintainer-in-Residence.

Want to help? You can sponsor the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund directly on GitHub Sponsors. For companies and larger donations, reach out to funding@rust-lang.org.

We're also brainstorming ideas for an individual fundraising campaign to help grow the fund; if you'd like to pitch in ideas or follow along, join the discussion on the funding stream on Zulip.

Gathering details: what we learned

We sent out messages to existing Rust team members asking people to fill out a form if they were interested in being supported by the funding team. We heard from 45 individuals looking for funding and 3 teams gave us a general update.

Broken out by area (with some double counting as some individuals opted for more than one area):

Area	Count
compiler	21
libs	4
clippy	3
rustdoc	2
a-mir-formality	1
cargo	1
crates.io	1
infra	1
lang	1
mods	1
Rust Analyzer	1
rustup	1
Safety Critical Rust Consortium	1

Of the respondents, 34 indicated interest in a general maintenance (MiR) role and 13 indicated interest in being funded towards specific project goals (some people indicated both). We also asked about desired arrangement and compensation; as expected, there was a wide variance, with many preferring full-time employment but also many looking for contracts or part-time work.

2025 survey results show the need is real

There is a definite need for funding. In November of 2025 we ran a survey amongst active Rust maintainers. In that survey we found that 35% of contributors who filled the survey are currently funded for their Rust contributions (and this also includes people who only receive a minimal monthly amount e.g. through GitHub Sponsors). A similar number of people (~35%) never received any funding for their upstream Rust work. Even though many of those people are not funded at all, the average number of hours spent by a Rust Project contributor on improving Rust is around 40 hours each month!

Hashing out the details of the MiR program

The goal of the MiR program is to provide open-ended funding to support Rust maintainers and by proxy also the Rust teams that they operate in. As we discussed in our blog post "What is Maintenance, anyway?", the precise needs of teams vary, so this can be tricky to define.

The important thing is that MiRs help "enable other contributors to evolve and improve the project". For some teams, this might mean helping to run triage meetings, or burning through a PR review backlog. For others, it might mean focusing on a big refactor that everybody on the team knows is necessary, but nobody has the time to do.

General shape: year-long contracts with expectation to renew

To begin with, the MiR program will consist of year-long contracts that come with the expectation but not guarantee that they will be renewed year-over-year. It's too early in this program to judge how stable our funding will be and thus we are not able to make long-term promises around renewal.

Flat rate or negotiated rates? One of the obvious questions that had to be decided is whether we should pay all Maintainers in Residence the same rate or whether we should negotiate on a case-by-case basis. We've decided to start with a flat rate, independent of geography. This is more transparent and easier to administer. It avoids questions of unfairness where someone is getting paid more because they're a better negotiator or because of where they live. On the flip side, it does mean that the MiR program will not be a good fit for people who live in expensive areas or who are looking for a higher salary than what we offer.

How much to pay? The next question of course is how much to pay. We looked at the incoming data that we received on what rates people are looking for, both in our recent survey as well as the November of 2025 survey, and also looked at comparable setups at other foundations (e.g., Zig). We've settled on the following flat rates, though in individual cases we may make small adjustments. Note that we've opted not to document this as an hourly rate, but rather a monthly rate with various levels of expected activity. This is because we don't intend to have people submit hourly reports to account for their time.

Activity level	Rate per month
Full time (~40h/wk)	$10K USD
Half time (~20h/wk)	$5K USD
Day (~8h/wk)	$2K USD
Half-day (~4h/wk)	$1K USD

Note that these are the amounts the Rust Foundation pays to the person or entity taking on the work; they are not a gross salary or take-home figure, and how they translate to net pay will depend on your situation and jurisdiction.

Exclusive? The MiR contracts are not "exclusive" so if a MiR wishes to take additional contracts on the side, that is fine, so long as they do not interfere with their ability to do maintenance work as discussed above.

Under discussion: Off-ramp period. As noted earlier, we expect to renew MiR contracts year over year but we are not in a position to guarantee that. Therefore, we are considering including a certain amount of "padding" in our budgeting so that if we are not able to renew the contract after one year, we can give MiR recipients an "off-ramp". The idea would be that if we are not able to renew the contract for another year, we can give a short-term payout to help cover expenses (and any maintenance they may choose to do...) while they find a new role. The goal is that MiR recipients can focus on maintenance worry-free for one year, even if funding is not renewed. Questions to be decided:

Do we do this off-ramp? We want to, but it does mean that we have fewer total MiRs.
Do we do this off-ramp for everyone? We are thinking we would offer the off-ramp only to full-time MiR (or perhaps full- and half-time), since if the MiR is only covering a day, that implies that the MiR is less dependent on the salary.
How long is the off-ramp? Our initial thought was 25% (3 months), but shorter would mean we can fund more work.

Why not employment? For many people, employment is the ideal setup (though by no means everyone), but we are not in a position to offer it at this time, because employment requires ongoing funding. As the MiR program evolves, we hope to be able to support long-term employment for established Maintainers in Residence, but that is something we'll have to figure out as the program matures.

How do we decide where to fund a MiR role?

We decided that rather than starting with individuals seeking funding, it was better to look at the teams that need funding first. But we know we're not going to be able to provide for all the teams at the level we would like to. Therefore, we wanted some rubric for how we prioritize which teams to fund. We settled on the following axioms that we can use to guide decisions:

End-user impact first. We prefer to fund maintenance of areas that have a real (direct or indirect) impact on Rust users' experience.
Dire needs first. Address the teams with the greatest need first — raise the floor before raising the ceiling.
Fund what no one else will. We lean toward maintenance, review, and triage: work with no natural corporate sponsor and no realistic path to directed funding.
Scale to demand. For areas with lots of potential for directed funding, we still want to fund maintainers to keep the code healthy between feature work.
Shovel-ready. Between equal-priority needs, we start with the one that can begin the soonest.

These axioms are written in priority order and they're meant to help us resolve tough decisions. For example, if we have to pick between two teams, both of which have dire need, but one of which has more visible end-user impact, we'll pick the one with more visible end-user impact because that will help us in raising additional funding later. (At the same time, these are rough guidelines, not iron laws: there may be particulars of the situation that lead us the other way.)

Short-list of teams. Based on the identified criteria, we are focused first on the following teams: rustup, rustfmt, clippy, rustdoc, libs, cargo, and mods (in no particular order).

Under discussion: what if there are no MiR applicants? There are teams that we would like to support but where none of the existing team members are interested in a MiR role (perhaps they have another full-time job or just like working on a volunteer basis). We are discussing how best to manage this situation when it arises. For example, we might approach the team and see if there are any active contributors they would support for a MiR role or perhaps put out a call for applications.

Restricted funding. So far, all the funds in the MiR were given unrestricted, which means that the funding team and the project can decide how to spend them. However, we have also had sponsors raise the idea of restricted funding, where a sponsor wants to fund a MiR for a particular team (say, rustfmt, or cargo) because they are concerned about that area, or even wants to fund a specific individual who they know does good work. We decided that we would happily accept restricted funding so long as the person is being funded to do maintenance work and generally treated like any other MiR.

What comes next?

This is our overall roadmap:

Rust Foundation: Announce program and begin fundraising
Leadership Council: Establish funding team and outlines of the MiR program (RFC #3931)
Funding team: Gather information on who is looking for funding and what work they'd like to do (👈 subject of this update)
Funding team: Hash out the details of the MiR program (👈 subject of this update)
Funding team: Narrow down to a short list of candidate MiRs and begin individual discussions (currently ongoing)
Funding team: Announce MiR selection (hopefully coming soon!)
MiRs: Do your thing.

At this point we have assembled a short list of candidates for our initial round of MiRs and we are planning to begin discussing specifics with them. This will help us to narrow to the final list. We are aiming to have that list announced by the end of August.

Launching the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund

2026-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

If you want to financially support the development of Rust, please consider donating to the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund.

A few months ago, the Rust Foundation announced the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund (RFMF). Since then, the Rust Project has been closely cooperating with the Rust Foundation to determine how exactly this fund will be used to support Rust maintainers. This resulted in the acceptance of RFC #3931, which established the Funding team and the Maintainer in Residence program.

The primary goal of the Funding team is to ensure that maintainers who work on Rust and its toolchain will be properly supported. We will talk to Rust Project members to figure out their funding situation, meet Rust team leads to learn about their maintenance needs, approach companies to find opportunities for them to invest into Rust by supporting Rust maintainers, coordinate various funding efforts and ensure that the beneficial effects of funded maintenance are visibly promoted, with the help of the Content team.

Maintainer in Residence is a new program dedicated to financially supporting existing Rust Project maintainers^[1]. Each Maintainer in Residence will be funded to maintain one or more critical parts of Rust, such as the compiler, the standard library, Cargo, Clippy or one of many other projects that the Rust Project develops and maintains. The funded work will include activities such as performing large-scale refactorings, code reviews, unblocking new features, issue triaging, mentoring other contributors and more, and will be split between priorities guided by the teams they are supporting and priorities of their own choosing within the Project. Where applicable, Maintainers in Residence are also encouraged to propose, champion, and drive forward Rust Project Goals.

The goal of this program is to provide stable and long-term funding so that maintainers can focus on important work that ensures the long-term health of Rust. The funding team will select Maintainers in Residence based on funding availability and maintenance needs within the Rust Project, and help ensure that they are successful. We expect that this will usually be a (near) full-time position, but that will depend on the nature of the work and the area of maintenance.

This program extends our existing support for Rust maintainers, such as the program management program and the compiler-ops program. An important development is that we now have a centralized mechanism for gathering donations from both individuals and companies, and a dedicated team that will help direct those funds to specific maintainers. You can find more details about the funding team and the Maintainer in Residence program in the RFC.

We expect to hire the first Maintainer in Residence in the upcoming months and announce it on this blog, so stay tuned!

How to contribute funds

If you are an individual who wants to help Rust succeed and thrive, you can donate to the RFMF through GitHub Sponsors^[2]. Companies who would like to invest in better maintenance of Rust can also donate through GitHub Sponsors or they can contact the Rust Foundation directly.

The important thing is that all proceeds from this fund will be directly used to support Rust Project maintainers. We currently expect that to happen primarily through the Maintainer in Residence program, but it can also be done in the form of smaller-scale grants or other mechanisms, as determined by the Funding team. We will figure this out on the go, as this is also quite new for us.

We really appreciate each donation, however small, because with more money we can hire more maintainers to ensure that we can continue to develop Rust and that important improvements are not blocked on maintenance tasks. This is especially important at this time, where Rust is starting to get used more and more in the industry in various application areas, which increases the need for sustained maintenance. The importance of multiple funding sources is underscored by an unfortunate trend we currently observe, where key Rust maintainers are losing their funding for Rust work due to budget shifts. The Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund is designed to provide stable funding for Rust maintainers that is less dependent on sudden shifts in the job market and the IT industry.

As with most things, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, so there are multiple ways to support Rust financially. The RustNL Maintainers Team recently hired several Rust Project maintainers. Previously, we wrote about how you can support specific individuals working on Rust. And there are also Rust Project Goals in search of funding. We welcome all efforts that can help support Rust Project maintainers, who often do work that is near invisible and thankless, while at the same time incredibly important and necessary, on a volunteer basis.

Thank you for considering sponsoring the development and maintenance of Rust! You can find more information about funding Rust on our Funding page.

This program was inspired by the Developer in Residence concept used by the Python Software Foundation (PSF), with which we led several helpful discussions. Thank you, PSF! ↩
Note that the fact that GitHub Sponsors is currently enabled on the rustfoundation GitHub organization, and not the rust-lang organization, is an implementation detail that might change in the future. All donations raised on this Sponsors page will be routed to the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund and will be spent on directly supporting Rust Project maintainers. ↩