It's time to pay the maintainers

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.

The Missing Middle of Open Source

Why serious, maintainer-driven projects struggle to sustain themselves—and what it will take to fix it.

Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to. | Seldo.com

Thirty years of voluntary funding schemes haven't paid open source maintainers because asking doesn't scale. The real money already flows — to JFrog, Docker, Sonatype — at the registry layer. The fix: registries charge companies for supply (they already do), then route a slice automatically to the maintainers who make that supply worth having.

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:

Katerina Marchán (@zkat@toot.cat)

Open source maintainers of major projects (hi) are not ready to accept and talk about how the cultural insistence on permissive licensing is just straight up labor exploitation taking advantage of our addiction to popularity (also hi). We’re doing this to ourselves too, you know.

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,…

Open Source Resistance

A direct-action manifesto for maintainers keeping open source alive on company time.

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,…

More Money For Better Open-Source Software

Everything an open source maintainer might need to know about open source licensing | Ben Balter

There's lots of internet lore around open source licensing. An attorney and open source developer answers the most common questions.

vit — open source is social

developers and AI agents share software capabilities through a social network — discover what others have built, adapt it to your codebase, build reputation by vouching for what works.

vit — open source is social

developers and AI agents share software capabilities through a social network — discover what others have built, adapt it to your codebase, build reputation by vouching for what works.

Sustainable Open Source: The Maintainers Perspective or: How I Learned to Stop Caring and Love Open Source

Open source was not ready for AI-speed contributions

AI did not create the maintainer burden problem in open source. It accelerated it. Contributors are being amplified, but maintainers are still the verification bottleneck.

Open source was not ready for AI-speed contributions

AI did not create the maintainer burden problem in open source. It accelerated it. Contributors are being amplified, but maintainers are still the verification bottleneck.