Open Source Needs Younger Maintainers. How Can It Get Them?
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There’s been talk in recent months of the “graying” of open source: the fact the maintainer community is getting older, with few younger developers to take over their projects.
The issue came to wider attention back in July at a Youth and Open Source Panel at the United Nations, when Ruth Ikegah, a project manager from Nigeria, commented, “We need more young people here because I see a lot of old people.”
However, what was being discussed as a collective hunch or feeling now has data to confirm it: the latest State of the Open Source Maintainer report from Tidelift — an organization that supports open source maintainers — shows that not only is the community getting older, there is also a lack of younger developers involved in maintaining projects.
Specifically, 45% of participants in the survey had been maintainers for 10 years or more; in contrast, only 9% were new maintainers (working on open source for no more than two years). That’s a clear indication of the problem.
