.NET Rocks! The Open Source Maintenance Fee with Rob Mensching
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May 1, 2025 Rob Mensching, CEO and co-founder of Fire Giant and creator of WiX, shares insights on the burnout crisis facing open source maintainers. He proposes an innovative maintenance fee model through GitHub to support these developers sustainably. The conversation highlights the challenges of single maintainers overwhelmed by user demands and emphasizes the importance of fair compensation. Rob discusses how this model can help balance the community’s needs with the realities of maintaining critical software projects.
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Stages Of Open Source Projects
- Most open source projects have different stages: hobby, working class, and mega corporate projects.
- Maintenance challenges intensify at working class projects where users depend heavily on maintainers without contributing.
Backdoor Attack Through Contributor Trust
- The XZUtils project suffered a hidden backdoor attack by someone gaining trust over time.
- The attacker posed as a helpful contributor before injecting malicious code to millions of Linux machines.
Separating License From Maintenance
- The open source license governs source code, but maintainers provide added services like builds and issue handling.
- Charging a maintenance fee for these non-code aspects supports maintainers without restricting open source rights.