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
Open Source Resistance
A direct-action manifesto for maintainers keeping open source alive on company time.
The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders
The open source movement runs on the heroic efforts of not enough people doing too much work. They need help.
Open Source Software and Corporate Influence — Andrew Lilley Brinker
Open source software projects are frequently enmeshed with the interests of corporations. We should update mental models of who works on open source accordingly, and build or modify power structures to be more resilient to corporate capture.
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).
Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open S…
An inside look at modern open source software developer…
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,…
AI creates asymmetric pressure on Open Source
How Open Source communities can adapt to AI-generated contributions without overwhelming Open Source maintainers
Burnout in Open Source: A Structural Problem We Can Fix Together ✸ Software Stewardship Lab
Burnout is affecting the entire Open Source ecosystem. Here's what we could do to make things better.
It’s time to rethink Open Source
Why developers give away valuable work for free — and what can be done to take that money back.
Open Source infrastructure deserves a business model
Open Source infrastructure is essential, invisible, and chronically underfunded. A more sustainable approach may be to connect the cost of running that infrastructure to the organizations that rely on it most.
Burnout in Open Source: A Structural Problem We Can Fix Together | Open Source Pledge
Burnout is affecting the entire Open Source ecosystem. Here's what we could do to make things better.
Open Source is Broken
The Open Source movement, as championed by the OSI, prizes absolute openness above all other concerns...
NSF investing in secure open-source ecosystems
Open-source software is ubiquitous, supporting artificial intelligence, data science, cloud computing, telecommunications and scientific research tools. Despite these benefits, the number of open-source developers is relatively small, and many projects lack sufficient resources, slowing the pace of innovation and making maintenance difficult. In addition, weaknesses in open-source software, such as security flaws, supply chain risks or insider threats, can spread across many connected systems. In extreme cases, these weaknesses could lead to large-scale failures that affect national or global systems.
