OSS Funding Is Broken — A Maintainer’s Perspective from FakerJS

A few days ago, I came across another familiar message in the open source world: a widely used project announcing that it can no longer compensate its contributors. This time it was Vuetify. But honestly, it could have been almost any project. This Is Not an Isolated Case If you’ve been around open source long enough, you’ve seen this pattern repeat itself: A project becomes popular It gains thousands (or millions) of users Companies quietly depend on it Maintainers keep it alive in their spare time Funding either stagnates… or disappears entirely We’ve seen this with projects like FakerJS, and we’re seeing it again now. Not just with one ecosystem either—this spans frontend, backend, tooling, infrastructure… everything. This isn’t a coincidence. It’s a structural problem. The Myth of Optional Funding There’s a common assumption in open source: “If a project is valuable, people will fund it.” In reality, that’s rarely how it plays out. Funding is treated as optional: Optional for compa