The purpose of the nonprofit organization is to always place the community first when the for-profit might fail to do such.

The nonprofit pushes the mission of MUI through MIT-licensed code. This is in opposition to the for-profit Company that relies on both MIT and commercial licenses to achieve the same outcome.

A few key pieces of information:

• The non-profit legal entity: Open Source Collective (OSC) https://opencollective.com/opensource. It’s a California nonprofit mutual benefit corporation organized and operated exclusively as a 501(c)(6).
• Our “Collective” page: MUI https://opencollective.com/mui-org
• The legal agreement between our open source project and Open Source Collective, the legal entity.
• As of today, the non-profit funding accounts for less than 1/100 of overall MUI’s finance. Please donate 💰 to help us open-source more features.

Finance

• https://opencollective.com/mui-org#category-BUDGET
• The same data but in a spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JYYhZN2JDaSXYsDYYyUSYU5pwtJf5hfoa8yJhHTL5ZU/edit#gid=895991335. We might move it to a BI tool in the future.

History

Initially introduced in 2017 to help share the donations and revenues between the different team members and accept Facebook donations.

It was only in 2019 that the for-profit company was incorporated to execute our vision at a higher velocity. At that time, based on the open data you can find above, Material UI was generating above $200k/year.

Supported contributors

Supported contributors are members of the community who demonstrate unique skills that we want to retain as they help the project differentiate and execute our mission.

These members are usually part-time, working in other organizations, which helps them bring a unique perspective on the product direction.

We also make full-time offers to exceptional contributors that we discover from the community. However, those have been extremely rare in the history of the project. less than 1 every 2 years.

Why?

We focus on attracting/retaining:

• part-time people who get to use the project every day, anchor them deeply into the product reality.