Lightning Talk: Do you know what your open source software maintainers are thinking?

Good evening. My name is Matthew Arnow, and I'm from Tidelift. If you're familiar, Tidelift, we work very closely with open source maintainers. In fact, part of our business is we pay the maintainers, as you might see on my shirt.

Every other year, we do a survey. These are maintainers around the globe, open source software maintainers around the globe. And we ask them, "What's going on? What are you thinking? How are things working for you?" And so I thought for tonight's session, I would take five minutes to talk about what we learned this year.

And if you want to get the full report, stay tuned to the end. I'll give you a link. Or come see me, Alex, and Luke somewhere out there. They're all wearing "Pay the maintainer" shirts, and we'd love to talk to you a little bit more about the full survey.

So despite increasing demands among consumers of open source software, which is all of us, if you know it or not, despite demands from governments, and of course enterprises like yourself, most maintainers are not paid for their work. In fact, 60% consider themselves what they call unpaid hobbyists. And out of that 60%, 48% would like to get paid.

That wasn't supposed to be funny, but I appreciate the laugh. Yeah, it's a little scary. And actually, only 13% identify themselves as professionals who earn most or all of their income from maintaining the projects that we all rely on.

And so, you know, if they're not getting paid for the work, why do open source maintainers care? Well, I'll give you three top reasons. One is they're able to work on projects that matter. Second is they're making a positive impact to the world, and that's great. And the third is they're fulfilling a creative need, a challenge, or just giving them something enjoyable to work on.

But note at the very bottom of this slide here is only 13%, again, enjoy getting or are able to get paid for their work today. And that's because they just haven't had the opportunity to get paid.

Meanwhile, here's what open source maintainers don't like. One, it adds to their personal stress. Two, and unsurprisingly, they're not being paid enough. Third is that the work can be lonely. I'm going to talk about that in a second here, about the loneliness factor of open source.

And fourth is what's happening right now with our governments and businesses. We're asking them to do more and more to comply with your standard development practices that you expect from your software vendors. And of course, you should expect that from your open source project vendors, if you will. Obviously not a vendor, but from your projects.

And the concerning part, I believe, is more and more we ask them to do more work around their projects that align to the security practices that your organizations rely on. There could be burnout. There could be all sorts of things that happen. And as I shared earlier, if they're getting paid, they're willing to do the work. But when they're not paid, this could lead to some burnout.

And speaking of burnout, almost half of the maintainers are solo maintainers, 44%. And the concern here is, again, what's going to happen when they get burned out if they're the solo maintainer? And 20% have only one other person supporting them.

Now, this is a staggering one, too. A majority of the people that we surveyed have either considered or have quit supporting their open source projects, and almost half because of the loneliness factor, the stress, and again, the financial incentive. And this is what can happen.

So I don't want to make this a dire keynote or a lightning talk, but what I do want to do is present some good news. So what we did find in this survey is when maintainers are getting paid, they're 20% to 30% more likely to complete security tasks, maintenance tasks, documentation, that they would do not as a hobby.

So I leave you with this. So if it's important for you to rely on open source, which I think everybody can confidently say they are, take the first step. Read the Open Source Maintainer Impact Survey that we put out this year, and learn how compensating open source maintainers for their work could lead to better outcomes for you all.

So there's many efforts to support open source. We're just one element of that. But again, come and see us outside. We'd love to chat with you, and we have some "Pay the maintainer" hats as well.

Thank you for your time.