When Projects Fail: Why Companies Should Treat Open Source as Infrastructure

Maintaining an open source project is hard. It requires managing a group of people who are largely working for free to build something that other people profit off of, usually distributed across the globe, with limited resources. The whole time you’re doing this, you’re receiving demands from users and businesses alike for features or bug fixes on a timeline that works for them, not you and your (possibly very limited) group of contributors that you can’t exactly order around, since they aren’t being paid. It’s stressful, and it can be overwhelming. When one of these projects is the victim of an attack that takes advantage of the fact that there are only one or two maintainers, or eventually has to shut down due to rising technical debt and falling contributor numbers, the public blame falls on us, not on the businesses that didn’t offer contributors in time. The Open Source Dependency Problem According to a 2022 Linux Foundation study, open source software makes up 70-90% of any given