What Is Open Source Sustainability?

Open source is built by individuals from around the world - some of whom are not paid a wage (or anything!) for their work. “Open Source Sustainability” is a movement to change the software ecosystem - contributors and users alike - to ensure better financial sustainability for the people and organizations who build the open source software the world relies on.

What Is “Pay The Maintainers” All About?

Some critical open source projects used across the web are maintained by small teams of unpaid individuals. The maintainers are the ones in charge of a project’s repository and making new releases - either to fix bugs, or address security issues. “Paying the maintainers” means finding ways to compensate maintainers for this often unpaid labor.

How Else Can I Think About Sustainability?

Sustainability of open source touches on many, many different realms of thought and action, and is a new field for many practitioners. Reviewing the key aspects of sustainability provides a framework to understand different areas of sustainability. The kinds of issues and factors that a sole maintainer cares about may be very different than those of a foundation, or an academic researcher thinking about long-term ecosystem health. We focus primarily on the social and financial sustainability of the people writing critical open source, as well as reliability and security of the open source software ecosystem as a whole.

Where can I go to learn more?

• Sustain OSS is a group of experienced FOSS volunteers from many projects running events, and writing guides for everything about making open source sustainable - not just financially. Read their 2021 report on the state of FOSS sustainability.
• Read the Getting Paid for Open Source Work guide for a holistic overview of how to think about approaching fundraising or donations for your FOSS work, and tips for maintainers too.
• Is your project looking for funding? Check out these organizations:
  • TideLift helps large software users to manage their dependency risk by paying groups of maintainers.
  • FundOSS is democratic fundraising in rounds for communities.
  • Open Source Collective provides legal and fundraising services to communities.
  • GitHub Sponsors lets you sponsor individual GitHub projects with monthly donations.
  • BountySource, Liberapay, IssueHunt each offer smaller scale funding tools, and Patreon is sometimes used for software projects too.
  • Nadia Eghbal’s lemonade-stand list of funding resources for how smaller FOSS groups can find funding.
• Confused by these terms? Try TL;DR FOSS or FOSS Funding for more topics on funding.
• Is your project looking to improve your governance? Read about FOSS Governance and then choose the right foundation for your community!
• Read about some definitions of “project health”, focusing on the sustainability of individual communities.
• For deeper takes, my FOSS Sustainability Zotero library is a curated list of topics, from well-written practical sites to academic research papers on open source.

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