Open Source Summit Europe 2024

Worldwide, we spend close to 2 trillion dollars per year for the loaded cost of software developers. If every company spent just 0.05% of that amount to fund open source maintainers, we’d unlock a billion dollars per year to fund the maintenance of open source. That would pay the full time salaries for thousands of maintainers, their managers, security training, etc. That seems fairly cheap for software that accounts for 70% to 97% of our software stack depending on how you count. And just imagine the positive impact on the security of our software supply chain! What are we waiting for? We’re way overdue making a clear distinction between open source developers and open source maintainers and professionalizing the latter. This talk will explore what doing so would actually look like and give an overview of the current efforts to support open source maintainers.