Become a Build Farm Backer + Infra Team Swag
Hi Everyone,
It is “Giving Tuesday” and we’ve put together a new fundraising campaign for the OSRF. This year we are asking community members to become a “Build Farm Backer” 
to help support the OSRF’s Build Farm. The OSRF’s Build Farm provides our community with critical services, and it is also one of the project’s largest expenses. We could really use your support and the support of your employer!
What is the Build Farm?
If you have ever downloaded a binary ROS package from apt, you’ve been the recipient of an artifact produced by the OSRF’s Build Farm. If you’ve ever run sudo apt update and had your ROS packages magically update to the latest version, you’ve also benefited from the OSRF Build Farm. The Build Farm is the OSRF’s GIANT Jenkins instance that takes open source ROS and Gazebo packages, builds them from source, tests them, and then delivers them to a variety of servers where they can be downloaded. To our knowledge, the ROS Build Farm is one of the largest public Jenkins instances in the world, and it takes a staff of multiple build farmers like Clara, Jorge, and Cristobal, and a number of AWS instances, just to keep things up to date and running. Our Build Farmers and infra team also handle really important jobs for the Open Robotics community like the development of core tooling, keeping our documentation and index websites up and running, responding to incidents, and maintaining all of the websites under our domains.
To give you an idea of just how big the OSRF Build Farm is, here are a few stats:
- Over 500,000,000 packages built by the Build Farm were downloaded in 2024.
- 95,000 unique packages have been produced by the Build Farm as of October 2024.
- Our Build Farmers maintain and run approximately 1500 unique Gazebo Build Farm jobs.
- Our Build Farmers maintain and run approximately 500 unique Gazebo CI jobs.
- Our Build Farmers produced about 5000 Debian packages in the last 30 days.
- Our Build Farmers performed close to 600 PR testing jobs in November 2025.
- Our Build Farm performed 400 CI builds and 100 PR testing jobs in the past 30 days.
- Each night, the build farm performs on average 63 hours of testing for ros-core packages.
- Each Build Farm nightly job builds around 360 packages.
We try to keep our costs for the Build Farm to a minimum, which means that fluctuations in AWS spot pricing (such as during CyberMonday) can impact the build farm and our testing jobs (see this meme from last week’s PMC meeting).
We Need Your Help!
To help cover our costs and keep the Build Farm running, we are asking for support from the Open Robotics community. We’ve put together a Build Farm Backer donation campaign to directly fund our Build Farm and our Build Farmers. We’re asking Build Farm users and their employers to donate this holiday season to help keep our open source community secure and sustainable. If you have ever saved time by downloading a ROS or Gazebo binary package instead of compiling it from source, we would love your support. The money raised by this campaign goes directly to the OSRF, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and is tax-deductible in the US. When talking to your employer about donating, make sure to mention that the binary packages produced by our Build Farm not only save you compilation time but also help keep your systems secure and up to date! Also, please help us spread the word! We take privacy seriously, and we don’t track our users, which makes it difficult for us to reach our users when we need help.
Infra Team Swag
As part of our Build Farm Backer campaign we are also offering, for the first time ever, OSRF Infra Team swag. If you are an infra team contributor, or would just like to show your support, you can pick up an Infra team t-shirt, hoody, mug, bag, or poster in our new FourthWall shop. All proceeds from the Infra Team swag directly benefit the OSRF and its non-profit mission. As part of our Build Farm Backer campaign we’re offering 20% off of all Open Robotics swag with the code GIVINGTUESDAY20.
