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Arthur T Knackerbracket [soylentnews.org] writes:

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story [theregister.com]:

The theme cropped up repeatedly during 2025's State Of Open Conference, with speakers from tech giants and volunteer maintainers laying out the challenges. Much of the open source ecosystem relies on volunteers putting in too many hours for too little support and the cracks are growing.

Four hours a month... does not come close to meeting the demands of users and the "How hard can it be?" brigade. Maintainers are undoubtedly under pressure, and many have either quit or are considering doing so...

This week, the lead of the Asahi Linux project – a Linux distribution for Apple silicon – Hector Martin, abruptly quit [theregister.com], citing factors including developer burnout and demanding users.

Jamie Tanna, who gave himself the title of "Tired Maintainer" put it simply [youtu.be]: "Being an open source maintainer is really rewarding... except when it isn't."

Tanna has been active in the open source world for several years, although it was the experience of being an oapi-codgen [github.com] maintainer that he spoke about. For the uninitiated, oapi-codgen is a tool to convert OpenAPI specifications to Go code.

"It's used by a load of companies... and a load of angry users."

The story is a familiar one. Tanna has helped out with some issues on the project and had volunteered for maintainer duty. There was a flurry of releases, but before long, the time between each release began to lengthen. Being a maintainer, he explained, with big or small projects (but especially big ones) meant dealing with "fun" users who are very happy to express their feelings as well an ever-increasing list of requests.

The experience of feeling under pressure, isolated and faced with a growing pile of work while receiving the occasional unpleasant message from an entitled user demanding their issue be dealt with now or that a contribution merged be immediately is far too common.

Tanna is relatively fortunate – his employer gives him four hours a month to work on the project. However, that does not come close to meeting the demands of users and the "How hard can it be?" brigade. Maintainers are undoubtedly under pressure, and many have either quit or are considering doing so.

Many projects, even those deemed 'critical infrastructure' are supported by very few people (often with one person doing most of the work)...

Sophia Vargas, an analyst and researcher for open source programs and operations at Google, told The Register that "Absolutely" maintainers were under pressure. Vargas added that the pressure was "both systematically and at the individual community level.

"Many participants in open source feel that open source projects are chronically undersupported, especially given the growing appetite for using open source software.

"This feeling is also reflected in the numbers: many projects, even those deemed 'critical infrastructure' are supported by very few people (often with one person doing most of the work), many maintainers have considered quitting, and many projects may not be maintained at all."

Vargas used figures including a 2024 Tidelift survey [tidelift.com] that put a figure of 60 percent on maintainers that had either quit or were considering quitting, and another [linuxfoundation.org] [PDF] from the Linux Foundation showing that most of the more widely used Free Open Source Software was developed by only a handful contributors.

Kubernetes maintainers Kat Cosgrove and Jeremy Rickard weighed in on the discussion too. Rickard, a Microsoft employee, also works on the CNCF code of conduct. The pair run a survey collecting the experience of maintainers and project contributors.

Cosgrove noted the number of respondents was too small to be statistically significant, however, the problem wasn't just maintainers being on the receiving end of pressure and abuse. The issues extended to users on the sidelines. "They like the project less, and seventy percent considered whether or not they should contribute to that project."

Dealing with the problem is difficult. Do maintainers simply need to be paid in recognition of their efforts? Vargas is unsure that everything has a financial solution and noted research (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3674805.3686667) presented at this year's FOSDEM. Vargas told The Register, "Money is not going to solve all problems."

"Each maintainer and project has their own context and challenges - while many maintainers would benefit from financial support, others really could use more contributors to complement their work and remove responsibilities from them - especially for non-code tasks like mentorship, community management, issue triage, promotion and fundraising, etc."

Rickard also worried about a potential squeeze on budgets as economic uncertainties bite and talked of raising awareness on platforms such as GitHub around sponsorship, given a contraction in the funding of projects by companies.

"You've got to have something as a catalyst for that change to happen. We, as a group of humans, don't seem to do proactively very well."

Cosgrove said, "I'm afraid it'll take a significant project falling over to convince them [the users] that paying for open source maintainers is worthwhile and, in fact, may actually be a requirement.

"I don't want to see that happen because the fallout will be ugly and gross, but I'm concerned that that's what it'll take."

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