Almost half of maintainers feel underappreciated and like the work is thankless

In mid-2024, Tidelift fielded its third survey of open source maintainers. More than 400 maintainers responded and shared details about their work, including how they fund it, who pays for it, and what kinds of security, maintenance, and documentation practices they have in place today or would consider in the future. They also shared their thoughts about some “in the headlines” issues like the recent xz utils hack and the impact of AI-based coding tools. In this post, we share the eighth of twelve key findings. If you don’t want to wait for the rest of the results, you can download the full survey report right now.

In our previous maintainer surveys, we’ve asked maintainers to tell us more about what they like and dislike about being an open source maintainer. We’ve gotten a good sense for what maintainers like about their work, so we decided not to ask about that again this year (feel free to review our previous reports if that subject interests you!). 

But pressure on open source maintainers to do more continues to rise each year. And the multi-year hacking effort waged against xz utils maintainer Lasse Collin (sadly captured in this email exchange below) that was uncovered this year is a stark and timely reminder of the high costs maintainers sometimes pay to continue their work (we’ll talk more about the xz utils hack in our next finding).

So we decided to ask the question about what maintainers dislike about their work again to see if the answers had changed. 

What do maintainers dislike most about their work?

While the choices stayed mostly the same as in the last survey, we brought back one choice “feel underappreciated or like the work is thankless” that we did not ask about in 2023. And we’re glad we did. Since we last provided that as an option in 2021, when 40% of maintainers selected it, almost half (48%) of maintainers now feel that way about their work.

The only choice that, unsurprisingly, was selected by slightly more maintainers (50%) as something they dislike was “not financially compensated enough / at all for my work,” which has remained consistent in all three surveys (49% in 2021 and 52% in 2023).

Last year’s number one response “adds to my personal stress” dropped significantly from 54% to 43%, which we believe is because we did not include the option for “feel underappreciated or like the work is thankless” in 2023. This response actually tracks with where it was previously in the 2021 survey when we provided both options (43% this year vs. 45% in 2021). Still, even though it rated lower this year, “adding to my personal stress” placed a solid third as a thing maintainers dislike about their work.

Other selections that dropped significantly this year include “can be lonely,” which dropped from 42% in 2023 to 32% this year, and “takes too much of my time” which dropped from 31% in 2021 to 21% in 2023 and 17% this year.

What maintainers dislike about their work in their own words

We also asked maintainers to tell us in their own words why they made the selections they did, and parsed the answers to reveal key themes. Many of the responses were related to time and work-life balance, while other top themes were lack of appreciation and support, user entitlement and demands, and financial challenges.

On the subject of time and work-life balance, one maintainer shared: 

"You end up doing a lot of stuff simply because it needed to be done, and nobody else was doing it. You feel you're responsible for it, the work just keeps piling up, and in the end, you're so busy you don't even have time to try to find co-maintainers.”

Another maintainer complained about the sense of entitlement many users have. 

"Most users, even ones who require fixes, are not willing to roll up their sleeves to help. They just expect someone else to fix it for free."

Or, as another maintainer put it more bluntly: 

"The entitlement of the open source community is off the charts."

These demands can often seem callous and uncaring, as one maintainer described: 

"Users can be so entitled. 'Why haven't you merged/fixed this? This project is dead.' No, I have debts, a full-time job, a young family, my parent just died, and my wife has a serious medical issue. I have already sunk thousands of hours into this project, I don't have time to deal with this right now."

How many maintainers are quitting?

It’s no wonder that year after year, our survey shows that more than half of maintainers have either quit or considered quitting their maintenance work. This year the percentage of maintainers who have either quit or considered quitting their work was 60%, which is consistent with the 58% in 2023 and 59% in 2021.

One maintainer summed up their feelings very succinctly:

"Open source has powered a massive trillion-dollar injection of value into the world, the financial value of which has been reaped by large corporations, which on the whole give very little back to the ecosystem, not even appreciation, respect, or gratitude."

As this Forrest Brazeal cartoon shows, the disconnect between companies’ expectations of open source and maintainer motivation to continue working on open source is extremely dangerous. If we don’t figure out how to properly compensate and recognize maintainers for the value they create, we might wake up one day and find that the projects we rely upon most are no longer being maintained at all.