80
FOSS Is Always One Maintainer From Collapsing
(www.youtube.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
80 points (92.6% liked)
Free and Open Source Software
20406 readers
33 users here now
If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Maintainers quitting is definitely a loss for everyone. However, we all have the source code. Hard fork and someone new takes up the mantle. Almost guaranteed to happen if the project is important enough.
As a foss project maintainer i think a lot of people underestimate how few people are willing to take over and maintain a project.
Furthermore I think a lot of people underestimate the time and effort it takes to maintain a project.
We see foss projects dying all the time, despite the code being available!
I want to be a maintainer and help out but I just know it'll be exhausting. I swap languages/projects all the time. I was on the DB (OLAP), architecture, GenAI and DevOps teams just this year alone. The context switching is really bad. I still would like to contribute but I'd want to pick a project that I used semi-regularly and it's hard to identify when I'm so scatter-brained :/
I agree with you in general. Many small projects with limited popularity are one heartbeat away from disappearing forever. However, projects that are absolutely essential to prevent “collapse” as the video suggests will almost certainly find new life. Red Hat, Google, Canonical, Valve, Synology etc. that all rely heavily on open source projects will pump cash to keep them alive if it comes to that. It’s not true across the board universally, but in general collapse is not imminent.