Rebuilding the Cathedral by Nadia Eghbal →

Nadia’s excellent talk discusses the woes of open source in the last few years, with special notice given to the growth pains.

Open source has grown massively in popularity but the model has remained the same: most projects have at most 1 or 2 maintainers handling contributions, bug reports, and support requests. On top of that, we have several orders of magnitude more projects. With a massive increase in demand and a relatively minuscule increase in funding, open source maintainers are burning out. How can we keep open source alive? I’m not sure, but our current funding support needs to change. Folks maintaining “for fun” on the weekend on projects which help companies make millions of dollars won’t keep us afloat.