Open Source Maintainers Are Feeling The Squeeze

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The theme cropped up repeatedly during 2025's State Of Open Conference, with speakers from tech giants and volunteer maintainers laying out the challenges. Much of the open source ecosystem relies on volunteers putting in too many hours for too little support and the cracks are growing.

This week, the lead of the Asahi Linux project - a Linux distribution for Apple silicon - Hector Martin, abruptly quit, citing factors including developer burnout and demanding users.

Jamie Tanna, who gave himself the title of "Tired Maintainer" put it simply: "Being an open source maintainer is really rewarding... except when it isn't."

Tanna has been active in the open source world for several years, although it was the experience of being an oapi-codgen maintainer that he spoke about. For the uninitiated, oapi-codgen is a tool to convert OpenAPI specifications to Go code.

"It's used by a load of companies... and a load of angry users."

The story is a familiar one. Tanna has helped out with some issues on the project and had volunteered for maintainer duty. There was a flurry of releases, but before long, the time between each release began to lengthen. Being a maintainer, he explained, with big or small projects (but especially big ones) meant dealing with "fun" users who are very happy to express their feelings as well an ever-increasing list of requests.

The experience of feeling under pressure, isolated and faced with a growing pile of work while receiving the occasional unpleasant message from an entitled user demanding their issue be dealt with now or that a contribution merged be immediately is far too common.

Tanna is relatively fortunate - his employer gives him four hours a month to work on the project. However, that does not come close to meeting the demands of users and the "How hard can it be?" brigade. Maintainers are undoubtedly under pressure, and many have either quit or are considering doing so.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.