In early 2021, Tidelift fielded its first-ever comprehensive survey of open source maintainers. Nearly 400 maintainers responded with thoughts about h

Finding #1: About half of maintainers get paid nothing for their work

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2021-07-24 12:00:04

In early 2021, Tidelift fielded its first-ever comprehensive survey of open source maintainers. Nearly 400 maintainers responded with thoughts about how they fund their work, what they enjoy about being a maintainer, what they don’t like so much, along with a host of other interesting insights. In this post, we share the first of nine key findings. If you don’t want to wait for the rest of the results, you can download the full survey report right now here.

One of the hottest topics in open source today is the relationship between money and maintainers. The most pressing questions surround how open source maintainers should be compensated for their work and whether they are being paid for it today. So we made the issue of maintainer compensation a core part of our first maintainer survey.

Historically, some have made the case that a good percentage of open source maintenance work is already being funded by companies employing maintainers. Others have speculated about whether maintainers would rather work independently and autonomously. And many believe that today most maintainers are volunteers , and are paid little—if at all—for the work they do. 

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