🧬 Open-Source Sustainability
This is a follow-up post to Lessons Learnt from Open-Source.
Maintainer burnout is real. I haven’t been active on open-source for quite a few months now. A lot of my projects are dying a slow death. As mentioned in the above post, I simply don’t have the time nor the energy to maintain old projects or start new ones. I have 500+ PRs pending to review which already feels like a nightmare!
I’m saddened to hear that CodeFund is shutting down. Their vision was to create an ethical path for open source projects to generate funds. I used CodeFund in a couple of my projects. I highly appreciate what they were trying to do and the impact they made (paid out over $670,000 to developers, bloggers and app builders all over the world).
The open source economy is ripe for disruption, but it has been so for a long time now. Developers are best suited to solve this problem as they understand the pain points first-hand. Or Microsoft. Right now, companies sponsor OS projects for marketing / branding reasons. Open Collective and GitHub Sponsors are a step in the right direction, but there’s still miles to go. Donations are hard to pull off - you need to significantly invest time to structure it in a way that makes people pull out their wallet. The Spotify Model incentivizes tiny utilities rather than complex libraries. Sponsorware looks promising - I have seen a couple of folks pull it off, but all of them already had an audience beforehand. EthicalAds is continuing where CodeFund left off, with the same mission, goals, and ethics.
If you’re interested in diving deeper, you should check out insights from Sustain Summit 2020!
Until We Meet Again…
🖖 swap