We conducted a survey in the spring, asking the community a wide range of questions to help shape the new fellowship for maintainers. This 12-month pr

What open source maintainers shared with us

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2024-10-18 10:00:08

We conducted a survey in the spring, asking the community a wide range of questions to help shape the new fellowship for maintainers. This 12-month program supports the people who work on critical digital infrastructure. Here are some of the insights we uncovered.

The goal of the Sovereign Tech Fund is to strengthen critical open technologies and make the open source ecosystem more resilient. Even before the xz incident became public in March 2024, we had been looking at how individuals who play important roles in the maintenance and care of critical technologies can be better supported in the public interest.

We carefully explored how to construct a fellowship program tailored to the needs of the people keeping critical open source projects running. The insights and feedback from our survey and other research on FOSS maintainers have helped us to design the fellowship and launch the pilot program: Applications can be submitted until October 20, 2024.

In evaluating the responses and reading the many comments, we identified a few aspects that we would like to share here. We would like to thank the open source maintainers who took the time to complete our survey.