The People Supporting the Internet
canopic jug writes:
Jon Henshaw has summarized a report about Internet infrastructure. Of about two dozen critically essential infrastructure components, about half have only one or two developers and little to no public funding.
A new analysis from sheets.works, The people holding up the [I]nternet, reveals that in 2026, key pieces of software the internet depends on are still underfunded or don't receive any public funding at all. Many of those critical components are kept alive and updated by individual contributors, and it's often just one or two people.
The analysis looked at the full history of 23 pieces of software that phones, browsers, and servers rely on. It counted everyone who made ten or more changes between October 2025 and October 2026. Of those 23 projects, 11 had only one or two people doing the regular work.
Even some of the larger projects go mostly underfunded or even unfunded. For example, if OpenBSD received even a penny for each commercially deployed instance of either the OpenSSH client or server, their budget worries would be finished.
Previously:
(2025) Curl Project Founder Snaps over Deluge of Time-Sucking AI Slop Bug Reports
(2022) SQLite: Past, Present, and Future
(2022) The New Yorker on NTP Software Maintenance
(2016) Dutch Government Says "No" to Backdoors after Giving 500,000 Grant to OpenSSL
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