This is the fourth year in a row Tidelift conducted a survey about open source but the first time it focused exclusively on the maintainers who create and maintain the open source projects we all depend on.
Over 500 people that maintain at least one open source project responded to the survey in February and March 2021. An incentive (free socks) were offered to most participants, with Chuck Taylor sneakers given to Tidelift-partnered maintainers—people under contract to provide a set of agreed upon security, maintenance, and licensing-related assurances for at least one project as part of the Tidelift Subscription. After screening for quality and other criteria, we focused our analysis on 378 respondents who completed a majority of the questions.
Here’s more detail about the survey demographics: