This post is heavily inspired by my experience over the last ten years participating in the open source community and eight years as a maintainer of Homebrew (which I’ve maintained longer than anyone else at this point).
Open Source Maintainers Owe You Nothing
This post is heavily inspired by my experience over the last ten years participating in the open source community and eight years as a maintainer of Homebrew (which I’ve maintained longer than anyone else at this point).
The Missing Middle of Open Source
Why serious, maintainer-driven projects struggle to sustain themselves—and what it will take to fix it.
Sustainable Open Source: The Maintainers Perspective or: How I Learned to Stop Caring and Love Open Source
What it feels like to be an open-source maintainer
Outside your door stands a line of a few hundred people. They are patiently waiting for you to answer their questions, complaints, pull requests, and feature requests. You want to help all of them,…
What it feels like to be an open-source maintainer
Outside your door stands a line of a few hundred people. They are patiently waiting for you to answer their questions, complaints, pull requests, and feature requests. You want to help all of them,…
Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
Open Source software runs the Internet, and by extension the economy. This is an undisputed fact about reality in 2021. And yet, the role of Open Source maintainer has failed to mature from a hobby into a proper profession.
Sustain
Sustain brings together practitioners, sustainers, funders, researchers and maintainers of the open source ecosystem. We have conversations about the health and sustainability of the open source community. We learn about the ins and outs of what ‘open source’ entails in the real world. Open source means so much more than a license; we're interested in talking about how to make sure that the culture of open source continues, grows, and ultimately, sustains itself. Newsletter
Open Source Resistance
A direct-action manifesto for maintainers keeping open source alive on company time.
Why we never thank open source maintainers · Tech blog of Unicooo
Why we never thank open source maintainers - Unicooo
Robot Pedantry, Human Empathy
Homebrew was the first open source project I’ve maintained where I’ve had to review and merge contributions from other users. Homebrew is also one of the most active community projects on GitHub with a consistently small team of maintainers (always under thirty in total, always under ten doing work every week). As a result I’ve had to figure out over the last twelve years how best to manage large numbers of contributions from users in pleasantly and efficiently for both maintainers and contributors.
Paying people to work on open source is good actually - Jacob Kaplan-Moss
If you have a problem with maintainers getting paid then you have a problem with me and I suggest you let that one marinate.
I’m Now a Full-Time Professional Open Source Maintainer
It works! I am now a full-time independent open-source maintainer. I'm announcing my first cohort of six clients, and sharing some details of how the model works.
The struggles of an open source maintainer - <antirez>
Open Source Saturation
In Supporting Open Source Software I discussed the critical need for better support for contributors to open source projects. Now, Quo Vadi...
