What can we do to make Open Source more sustainable?
summary
Popular libraries like curl and OpenSSL with billions of installs but single-digit maintainer counts create real risk as maintainers spend thousands of unpaid hours and burn out. Concrete fixes include corporate contracts that allocate paid days for maintenance, foundations or companies picking up critical projects as with Lerna, and funding tools like GitHub Sponsors helps small projects. Guardrails include automated maintainability checks, clear governance, and avoiding single points of failure like the npm package pull that broke many builds.
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chapters (6)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:49Open source scale
- 4:03Sustainability challenges
- 6:12Consequences of unsustainability
- 8:40Solutions for sustainability
- 11:49Sustainable future
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