23rd January 2024 - Link Blog
The Open Source Sustainability Crisis (via) Chad Whitacre: “What is Open Source sustainability? Why do I say it is in crisis? My answers are that sustainability is when people are getting paid without jumping through hoops, and we’re in a crisis because people aren’t and they’re burning out.”
I really like Chad’s focus on “jumping through hoops” in this piece. It’s possible to build a financially sustainable project today, but it requires picking one or more activities that aren’t directly aligned with working on the core project: raising VC and starting a company, building a hosted SaaS platform and becoming a sysadmin, publishing books and courses and becoming a content author.
The dream is that open source maintainers can invest all of their effort in their projects and make a good living from that work.
Recent articles
- Perhaps not Boring Technology after all - 9th March 2026
- Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code? - 5th March 2026
- Something is afoot in the land of Qwen - 4th March 2026