Keeping up the Open Source promise for 2021

Keeping up the Open Source promise for 2021

COVID-19 has impacted the travel industry very severely. Even in these hard times, trivago remains committed to contributing to open source. As a tech company working on large-scale projects, we feel a responsibility towards supporting the open source community.

webpack, Preact and the CNCF

This year we will continue supporting projects and organisations that are having a major impact on the products we build and the happiness of our engineers who use them on a daily basis. These projects are webpack, Preact and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

webpack has been a key component of our frontend toolchain for the past 5 years. Either being directly configured for our needs or powering frameworks that are used across trivago projects. webpack has taken care of asset bundling, development experience, build performance and so much more for our projects. All of these are getting better by the day thanks to the huge community behind the project. We want to support the community to keep this vigour going.

Preact has gained amazing traction in the past couple of years in the frontend view layer framework space, and for all the right reasons. Excellent rendering performance, tiny size and compatibility with the large React ecosystem are just some of the reasons Preact captured our attention. At trivago, we have already adopted Preact for key projects and initiatives. Vibrant community, clear project goals and a great core team are the things that we want to help flourish even more.

The CNCF is the hosting organisation of many of the OSS tools we use to build our applications. These tools include Kubernetes, gRPC, Prometheus, Helm, envoy, CoreDNS, OpenTracing, and more. As members of these communities, and because we benefit so much from these projects, we want to support the foundation and thus play a more active role in the community.

A healthy relationship means giving back

As critical as open source software is for our products and services, we are really proud to also contribute back as much as possible to the community. Aside from financial support, we always consider sharing our solutions from our daily struggles and it makes us really happy to frequently release open source libraries and patches on the projects we use. A recent example of that is the release of the preact-hooks-testing-library which is now integrated in the official testing-library project.

That is exactly what we are aiming to do for 2021 and the years to come. By closely collaborating with the maintainers of these projects and interacting with the communities, we are keeping our promise of giving back to open source as much as possible.

Our commitment for 2021

This year we will invest in both Preact and webpack through Open Collective

  • $24.000 for Preact
  • $40.000 for webpack

and maintain our CNCF End User Supporter benefit program.

trivago understands its position as a company that benefits from the Open Source projects we rely upon. Without them, we would not be able to focus on building the products that our users enjoy and that help our business flourish.

We hope these resources will allow these projects to become a bit more viable for the maintainers, promote great work in technological innovation and work on even better development experience for engineers around the world.

Finally a word from our dear folks at Open Collective:

“trivago’s ongoing support of open source is a model for so many others to hear.. and follow. Now more than ever, the agility and innovation of open source is responding to a challenging world. Trivago’s investment in open source makes a difference both to these open source communities and complementary to the success of trivago.” – Alyssa Wright, Director of Partnerships and Community.