A Year of Open Source

As I've written about in previous posts, I spent much of 2020 experimenting with making open source my full-time job as a paid maintainer for both ESLint and Babel. I had fully intended to do more writing and share more about my learnings about sustainable open source software as I went along, but – as we all experienced – the past year had other plans for me. After a year of trying to make my open source work a sustainable practice (November '19 – November '20), I decided that it was time to call the experiment complete and began working at Outsmartly, where I get to use my knowledge of static analysis to solve some really interesting and impactful problems.

Now that I've had some distance from the experiment, I wanted to take a few moments to reflect on and share what I learned through the process. I still believe sustainable open source software is a worthy goal, and have no regrets spending the time and energy I did pursuing it. I wish that the opportunity to do so hadn't intersected with the upheaval of the pandemic and absolutely bonkers state of government in my country, but I'm deeply grateful that I've had my health and was able to work remotely while we've sheltered in place the last 10 months.

Now, onto what I've learned! Please keep in mind that these opinions are based on my anecdotal experiences and that I come from the privileged place of having had years of stable work in the field of software development before I embarked on this as well as health insurance covered by my spouse's employer. These are not small privileges, and without them, I don't think I would have felt free to explore this at all. I'd like to also preface this by saying that I'm so grateful to all the members of the community who sponsored my work through GitHub Sponsors, Open Collective, and TideLift, as well as the platforms themselves. Without all of you, the work I did this past year would not have been possible.

One of the reasons I decided to pursue this year of open source is that I had found that open source work (volunteer or paid) in addition to a full-time job was not sustainable for me. I felt like I had to choose between my open source work and my job, for the sake of my own health and wellbeing. Truly believing that the projects I helped maintain were key to the infrastructure of the web, it seemed like a worthwhile pursuit to see if I could choose open source and make it work.

Despite the enormous generosity from the community, I unfortunately found myself struggling to meet the financial threshold I had set as a goal to make this sustainable over the long haul. I'm lucky to have had savings that allowed me to continue doing this for the time I had, but without those this whole endeavor would not have been possible. Practically speaking, this meant that I had to split my time between multiple projects and had to spend a lot of time and energy on figuring out how to make up for that gap.

My biggest takeaway from this experience is that paid, part-time maintenance of popular open source software projects is not enough to make this a sustainable practice. Without hitting the threshold of income necessary to make ends meet, the maintainer is still forced to split their attention between their open source work and other work necessary to survive. Even in the case of treating open source as an additional part-time paid job, I believe we are still asking too much of the maintainer. This inevitably leads to stagnation in the tools themselves and, worse, burnout (bad for the maintainers) and abandoned projects (bad for the community).

I want to reiterate that I'm so thankful to all of you who supported my work this past year. We as a community still have a lot to learn about how to make open source software a sustainable practice, and I'm so grateful for the trust placed in me and the opportunity I had to further this cause.

The advent of donation platforms like GitHub Sponsors, Open Collective, and TideLift has been fantastic for getting this conversation started, but we still have long way to go! Open source software deserves the same attention and investment that the products that are built on them get, and I hope that we as a community are able to eventually make this a reality.