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
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
A plan for open source software maintainers
It seems to me that this is a case where problems are in fact solutions to other problems. To wit:
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.
Nibble Stew: The Nine Phases of an Open Source Project Maintainer
There is more to running an open source project than writing code. In fact most of all work has to do with something else. This places addit...
The struggles of an open source maintainer - <antirez>
Anthony Fu
It’s not a secret that open-source projects are now a critical part of almost every software project. While most open-source projects are maintained by volunteers, the sustainability of these projects becomes a big concern. The recent xz/liblzma vulnerability accident is a great example that shows the importance of open-source projects and how severe the problem could be.
Is open source broken or are we breaking it? - jsmanrique.es
Following my previous post, I’d like to keep sharing some personal humble thoughts about on going debates around open source status. This post is focus on the so called unbalanced relationship between open source software maintainers and open source software users. Who are the open source software maintainers? And the users? People develop and maintain … Continue reading "Is open source broken or are we breaking it?"
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).
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).
Open Source Sustainability
The status quo in open source is broken. Corporations profit hugely from open source libraries, and give almost nothing back, which leans to burnout which is bad for everyone.
Is Open Source Broken?
The movement to develop software applications and all manner of IT services through the open source model is fundamentally rooted in the notion of community contribution, but things have shifted.
Sustaining Open Source Software
The ‘open source sustainability’ debate continues with yet-another-company relicensing their product away from an open source license to…
