Sustainable Open Source

2013-06-13

Does Open Source have a sustainability problem? What percentage of projects are “ghost towns” after one year? Three years? Five years? Perhaps more importantly, high profile projects like Rubygems and Bundler take an incredible amount of time and effort to support existing users and move forward while also maintaining compatibility with hundreds of thousands of users and gems.

With the status quo, users get a huge amount of value but OSS developers burn out quickly due to the time and effort required to support their projects well.

What are possible solutions? I’d be interested in having a public Google Hangout chat sometime soon if other OSS developers are interested in talking about the problem and how to keep OSS developers happy and on a sustainable plan. Leave a comment if you’d like to participate.