On 21 October 2026 the Processing Foundation announced the Maintenance Fund: a permanent endowment that distributes $200,000 every year, in perpetuity, to Processing Java and p5.js. The money is split evenly between the two projects and is aimed squarely at the work nobody writes a press release about.
The announcement opens with a line from Casey Reas, who created Processing with Ben Fry in 2001 while both were students at the MIT Media Lab: “Free software is expensive to make.”
What the money actually buys
The Foundation is unusually specific about this, and the specificity is the point. The listed work includes:
- Keeping your p5.js Editor sketches online and accessible
- Keeping the p5.js reference page up to date
- Making sure Processing Java runs on newer computers
- Keeping Processing Java compatible with new operating systems
None of that is a feature. All of it is the difference between a tool you can rely on and a tool that quietly stops working. The Foundation’s framing is that legacy software accumulates technical debt the way an old house accumulates repairs: security vulnerabilities emerge, and the code falls out of step with modern platforms and frameworks. Some of it is an easy fix. Some of it is thorny enough to need sustained funding to address meaningfully.
A significant portion of the $200,000 covers 60% of the Project Leads’ compensation — the people who administer web infrastructure, manage releases, set direction from community input, and supervise contributors. The Foundation is explicit that Project Leads “handle what volunteer roles cannot.”
The argument underneath it
The Foundation does not pitch this as charity. It makes a structural argument:
Open-source software runs on volunteer labor, which means the inequities of time and resources in society get reproduced in open-source communities too. Not everyone can afford to contribute unpaid hours.
That is the case for paying maintainers stated about as plainly as it gets. If contribution is unpaid, contribution is filtered by who can afford to work for free, and the tool ends up shaped by that filter. Paying for the labour is presented as the mechanism for a broader set of people to shape p5.js and Processing Java — not an aspiration about community, but a budget line.
Governance: two committees, one annual report
The money comes with structure. The Foundation has established two bodies:
- the p5.js Shared Responsibilities Committee
- the Processing Java Shared Responsibilities Committee
Each includes representatives from the Foundation and from the community. Each sets project priorities, participates in budget allocation, and publishes an annual report to the community.
That last clause is the one to hold them to. An endowment with a published annual report is auditable; an endowment without one is a press release. The Foundation has committed to the former.
Where the endowment came from
The Foundation credits “generous donations from generative artists” for the principal. There is a neat circularity in that: a generation of artists who built careers on free software capitalising the upkeep of the free software. It is also, bluntly, the clearest evidence yet that the generative-art market of the last few years produced enough money to endow its own tooling.
The Foundation is careful to say the $200,000 covers only the minimum maintenance needs, and asks for additional donations on top.
Why this is the right way round
Most funding news in creative coding is about building something new — a grant for a project, a prize for a work, a residency. The Processing Foundation’s own microgrants programme is in that tradition and remains valuable. The Maintenance Fund is the opposite bet: that the most useful thing you can do with recurring money is guarantee the boring parts keep working for ever.
For anyone who has taught with p5.js, shipped a gallery piece in Processing, or opened a sketch from eight years ago and found it still ran, that is the more consequential announcement. Processing 5.0 shipped a WebGPU renderer and a Python mode this year, and p5.js has been moving fast on compute shaders. New capability is only worth having if the thing underneath it is still standing in a decade.
Twenty-five years in, the Foundation has decided to pay for the decade.
Sources
- Announcing the Processing Foundation Maintenance Fund — Processing Foundation
- A Quarter Century of Processing, Ars Electronica 2026: Negotiating Humanity — Processing Foundation on YouTube
- Processing Foundation