A list of resources to think about free software and open source current challenges. A work in progress. Contributions are welcome!

Burn out and/or quitting open source

Talks

• The Hard Parts of Open Source by Evan Czaplicki (and citations)
• Open Source & Feelings 2015 - What Part of "… for Life" Don't You Understand? by Jacob Kaplan-Moss
• Avoiding Burnout, and other essentials of Open Source Self-Care by Kathleen Danielson

Blog posts, articles and tweets

• Open source developer corrupts widely-used libraries, affecting tons of projects (theverge, Jan. 2022)
• actix-web post mortem (and the HN discussion and this blog)
• The struggles of an open source maintainer by http://antirez.com
• The Linux Mint Blog - Monthly News – March 2019 (and in betanews.com)
• Give Away Your Code, But Never Your Time by William Gross
• Why open source developers are burning out: No respect
• On Being a Free Software Maintainer by Georges Stavracas
• 5 rules for avoiding burnout by Jen Krieger
• GitHub is really good at visualizing burnout

Business models

• I’m Now a Full-Time Professional Open Source Maintainer (February 2023)
• Awesome Open Source Company (GitHub repository, started in May 2022)
• Why and how we raised VC funding for an open-source project (January 2022)
• Should I Open Source my Company? (March 2022)
• Enforcing the pyramid of Open Source (January 2022)
• How to build an Open Source Business in 2021 (Part 1) (November 2021)
• Open source has a funding problem (January 2021)
• Full-Time Open Source With Andrew Kelley (August 2021)
• "Should You Open Source Your Startup?" by Ben Awad (May 2021)
• The Luck of Open Source by Kyle E. Mitchell (May 2021)
• How to pay your rent with your open source project (June 2020)
• Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself (May, 2020)
• Death of an Open Source Business Model (Dec. 2020) (HN)
• Open source licensing and why we're changing Plausible to the AGPL license (Oct., 2020) (HN)
• Xs:code launches subscription platform to monetize open-source projects (Dec. 2019)
• Balancing Makers and Takers to scale and sustain Open Source (Nov., 2019)
• Re-Licensing Sentry (Nov. 2019)
• Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses (May 2019)
• Defining "sustainable" for an open-source project (Mar. 2019)
• FOSDEM 2019 and the challenge to finance Open Source (2019)
• Sustaining FOSS projects by democratizing the sponsorship process by adamstac, (2019)
• Making money with licenses (Nadia Eghbal, March 2019)
• AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source (Ben Thompson, stratechery.com, January 2019)
• FLOSS business models (Sustainable Free and Open Source Community, 2018)
• Open Source Confronts Its Midlife Crisis (Bryan Cantrill, December 2018)
• An alternate ending to the tragedy of the commons (Nadia Eghbal, May 2018)
• A EULA in FOSS clothing? (Bryan Cantrill, December 2018)
• Building a Business on Open Source (www.linuxfoundation.org, July 2017)
• Open Source Business Models Redux (Stephen Walli, 2017)
• Building an Open Source Service (David Cramer, blog.sentry.io, October 2016)
• The Economics of Software (Bryan Cantrill, August 2004)
• The Simple Economics of Open Source (www.nber.org, Josh Lerner, Jean Tirole, 2000)
• Microsoft: 'We Love Open Source' (www.pcworld.com August 2010)

Sustainability

Posts and articles

• Does open source need its own Priority of Constituencies?, Tobie Langel, 2021
• Scaling open source by creating potential, by David Nolen, Oct. 2020
• DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest is Hurting Open Source, by Domenic Denicola, Sept. 2020
• Open source can thrive in a recession says Drupal creator Dries Buytaert, Itw of Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal, May 2020
• How’s That Open Source Governance Working for You?, Nathan Schneider, Apr. 2020
• Open Source is Broken by Don Goodman-Wilson, Sept. 2019
• Don't fund Software that doesn't exist by Andreas Mueller, Jan. 2020
• Theory: average bus factor = 1 by anarcat, Nov. 2019
• The Internet Relies on People Working for Free by Owen Williams, Sept. 2019
• The Internet Was Built on the Free Labor of Open Source Developers. Is That Sustainable? by Daniel Oberhaus, 2019
• Defining "sustainable" for an open-source project by Jake Edge, Mar. 2019
• Let’s talk about open source sustainability by Devon Zuegel, 2019
• https://dieworkwear.com/post/182126040434/how-we-lost-our-ability-to-mend
• How to support open-source software and stay sane by Anna Nowogrodzki, 2019
• Load-Bearing Internet People by ESR, 2019
• Software below the poverty line by André Staltz, 2019
• Altruism Still Fuels the Web. Businesses Love to Exploit It by Zeynep Tufekci, 2019
• We need Sustainable Free and Open Source Communities by Adam Jacob, Dec. 2018
• Decentralized funding? An analysis of three programs by Nadia Eghbal, 2018
• $1m to pay open source maintainers on Tidelift by Donald Fischer, 2018
• Creating a New Source of Revenue for Open Source Software by Guillaume Luccisano, 2018
• Heart of Clojure 2019 - Daniel Compton - Building Stable Foundations
• The End of Gmane? by Lars Ingebrigtsen, Jul. 2016

Conferences, groups, initiatives

• https://sustainoss.org
• http://themaintainers.org
• https://maintainerati.org
• https://www.outreachy.org
• https://www.legacycode.rocks
• https://prototypefund.de
• https://www.piratecare.net/posts/call-for-papers/
• fundthecode.org: events to finance FLOSS projects
• https://github.com/sponsors (and the FAQ)
• https://www.maintainersanonymous.com/
• https://nadiaeghbal.com/microgrants
• Linux Foundation Core Infrastructure Project
• Help Sustain Open Source Communities by the Linux Foundation

Generalist websites

• faiross.org
• oss.fund: Open Source Software Funding Platforms Registry (discussed on discourse.sustainoss.org)
• Sustainable Free and Open Source Communities
• No Maintenance Intended

Infrastructure

• Russell and Vinsel, "Making Maintainers: Engineering Education and the Ethics of Care" preprint.
• Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure by Nadia Eghbal, 2016
• Exploiting Developer Infrastructure Is Ridiculously Easy by Jarrod Overson, 2018
• Every day, we rely on digital infrastructure built by volunteers. What happens when it fails?

Ethics and motivation

• Indigenous wisdom as a model for software design and development, 2021
• "Open Source" Does Not Mean "Includes Free Support", 2020
• Invasion of The Ethical Licenses, 2020
• Blood money is fine with us, says GitLab, 2019
• 6 myths about “ethical” open source licenses, 2019
• Why we need an Open Source Licence that considers the misuse of our code, 2019
• Major Open Source Project Revokes Access to Companies That Work with ICE by Daniel Oberhaus, 2018
• Why We Engage in FLOSS: Answers from Core Developers
• Of Money, Responsibility, and Pride by Steve Marquess
• Why Software Projects need Heroes (Lessons Learned from 1100+ Projects)
• What Core Contributors Want by Alanna Irving, 2019
• Why don't you accept donations? by Raymond Hill, 2015
• mastodon/mastodon#11129
• Software Community Growth through "first-timers-only" issues by gauravano with warren, 2019 (also see firsttimersonly.com)
• Finding your tribe - choosing open source communities

Related essays

• The cult of the free must die by Peter-Paul Koch, August 2020 (HN)
• The Principal Developer by Eduards Sizovs, 2019 (HN)
• https://logicmag.io/failure/freedom-isnt-free/ by Wendy Liu, August 2018
• The culture war at the heart of open source and What comes after open source?, by Steve Klabnik, 2018
• The Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming by Jessica Kerr, 2018
• 'Human-Computer Insurrection' (PDF)
• Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work (The Penguin Press, 2009)
• https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/right-to-repair-and-the-dmca/

Miscellaneous

• The OSI celebrates maintainer month, OSI, June 2021
• (ninth RacketCon): Governing Rust, by Aaron Turon, 2021
• No more free work from Marak - Pay Me or Fork This #1046, Nov 2020
• Recap of the `funding` experiment by Feross Aboukhadijeh, 2019
• But You Said I Could by licensezero, 2019
• Open Source is Not Enough by James Halliday, May 2018
• Maintainer vs. Community, by Mikeal Rogers, 2017
• https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-doesnt-anyone-weep-for-docker/
• https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/episode-24-chat-about-redis-labs-podcast-transcript
• https://armin.dev/blog/2019/08/supporting-browser-extension-developers/ (and HN)
• https://discourse.sustainoss.org/t/next-steps-for-the-working-group/23 (see ossgrants)
• https://twitter.com/pradyunsg/status/1146454278174756864
• https://twitter.com/ceejbot/status/1135125056487485440
• https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-bug-fixes-git.html
• https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/oss-relicensing-cockroachdb/ (on HN and theinformation.com)
• https://increment.com/open-source/the-rise-of-few-maintainer-projects/
• https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/GoIsGooglesLanguage
• Python request episode : on Twitter, vorpus.org and journal.kennethreitz.org
• https://blog.ubuntu.com/2019/04/29/canonical-consolidates-open-infrastructure-support-and-security-offerings
• https://changelog.com/podcast/233 about Webpack
• https://www.legacycode.rocks/podcast-1/episode/1c0e0b87/hail-the-maintainers-with-andrew-russell
• https://aws.amazon.com/fr/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-open-open-distro-for-elasticsearch/
• https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/8xypb5/the-dwarf-fortress-creators-werent-in-it-for-money-but-now-they-need-it
• Stepping stone history of FOSS assumptions, ethics, personalities & economics
• A Seasonal Report on Developer Trends in the Cloud: Open Source Edition
• Strange Loop - A Stitch in Time - The future of OSS Sustainability September 12-14 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA

French articles

See this file.