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
- AI assisted search-based research actually works now - 21st April 2025
- Maybe Meta's Llama claims to be open source because of the EU AI act - 19th April 2025
- Image segmentation using Gemini 2.5 - 18th April 2025