Sponsoring

Why sponsor Play?

At the end of 2021 Lightbend, the company that sponsored and lead the development of the Play Framework for almost a decade, handed over the project to the community. Since then the Play Framework uses Open Collective to gather money to pay contributors and to cover other project expenses in the most transparent way possible.

Your donation will help the project stay live and grow successfully. If you are interested in helping us maintain a vibrant community of contributors to improve and support the Play Framework, please go to our Open Collective page to become a backer or a premium sponsor.

Of course, we also encourage and highly appreciate other ways to contribute to the project and its community as well.

Becoming a backer

Backers that donate at least $5 per month to the project get the following benefits:

Becoming a premium sponsor

If your company is invested into Play or even depends on it to run its business and therefore has an interest in the success of the project, it can become a premium sponsor for a donation of at least $1200 per month or, as one time payment, at least $14400 within a 12 month period.

As premium sponsor you will have the following benefits:

If you have questions you can contact us at [email protected].

Who is responsible?

At the end of 2021, a group of people which have been heavily involved with Play's development in the past, formed a steering committee, which will lead the project and will take responsibility for the future development of the framework. All of its members contributed a substantial amount of code to Play or its sub projects and some are even former employees of Lightbend.

These members are:

What will the project do with the money?

Open Collective is a public and fully transparent plattform, so you have full insight into the projects financials. Anyone can file an expense, which needs to be approved by Play's Open Collective admins to get it reimbursed.

The money will be used to cover following project costs:

  • Payouts to core contributors working on Play
  • Website Hosting
  • Developer tooling and licenses
  • Legal protection

If enough money is available we will use it to:

  • Implement a bug bounty system, see this discussion
  • Pay expenses for developer gatherings: travel & food expenses for conferences and team meetings
  • Pay for project goodies
  • Pay Meetup fees

What are the next steps?

(December 2021)
Please have a look at our GitHub project board to see what is happening and what needs to be worked on to transform Play to a community-led organization. We also got asked about a roadmap and priorities regarding Play's development goals:

  • Security fixes
    Until now, when a security problem was reported, the Play team tried to fix it as soon as possible and usually released a new minor Play version containing a fix shortly afterwards. We plan to continue with this practice.
  • Support of the latest version of JVM
    Work to support for Java 17 LTS started in spring this year already, resulting in a dirty, but working, pull request which just needs some clean up to finally make it into the main branch. That means upcoming Play 2.9 will definitely support Java 17 LTS. Besides that, we plan to continue supporting Java 8 for at least Play 2.9 (actually there is absolutely no reason to drop it anytime soon).
  • Support of the latest versions of sbt
    That is our priority as well. In spring this year we made Play work with sbt 1.4+ (See #10648, #10711 and #10655. Adjustment in Play's code were needed because sbt 1.4 shipped with some internal changes (by adopting an internal "virtual filesystem") that made it incompatible with Play.
    Long story short: We will definitely support new sbt versions soon after they are released.
  • Support of the latest versions of Scala
    We plan to support Scala 3 as well. There is quite an interest in the community and also people willing to work on that. If everything goes well, we might see support for Scala 3 in Play 2.9 already. We dropped support for Scala 2.12 and sbt <=1.3 in the main branch already, to make it easier to cross build Play against Scala 3.
  • New releases for Play 2.7 or older
    We recognized some people wish that old Play versions should be maintainend longer, at least they should receive security and critical bug fixes. However that is a matter of who can invest time to maintain these old versions and therefore more or less depends on funding of the project. So if you want to see releases of older Play versions, please support the project financially.
  • Maintaining a stable API
    Right now, there is no plan to introduce any groundbreaking API changes. The plan for now is to make sure that Play stays maintained to get minor releases out and to finally cut Play 2.9 in the upcoming months. So, there is no plan to drive Play into a new direction. Of course there will very likely be new features, but after talking to companies and users that actively use Play in production, the goal right now is more that there are contributors that keep Play maintained in regards of supporting newest sbt/JVM/Scala versions, security fixes and new minor releases with fixes and major releases with new features wished by the community. As we did with the last major releases, we will publish migration guides.

Thank you!

Finally a huge thank you to every backer and premium sponsor to help Play move forward! Thank you very much!