A few months ago, we announced our partnership with the podcast The Changelog. Each month, we partner with them on a new Maintainer Spotlight podcast featuring an open source maintainer who is doing interesting work.
The latest episode is out featuring Feross Aboukhadijeh, the maintainer of over 100 open source projects including StandardJS and WebTorrent. Feross is also a Tidelift lifter—this means he offers assurances around some of his projects through the Tidelift Subscription.
In this episode, Feross shares his experiences as a prolific open source maintainer, from pushback to burnout, and ponders the state of open source and why companies built on open source should help open source software flourish.
But reaching out to companies takes time and effort. “That’s where the promise of something like Tidelift comes in,” Feross said. “Instead of maintainers having to interface with all these companies and try to explain to them why they should [care] about their dependencies, Tidelift can do that.”
It’s not all about money, of course. A huge reason Feross started working on open source code was because he wanted to contribute to something everyone can benefit from.
“I want to give a gift to the world,” Feross said. “I love the idea of giving away my code and just letting anyone do what they want with it.”
Feross is optimistic about the future of open source, and believes his participation in open source has been a huge benefit for him personally.
“I really do feel like being a maintainer has been one of the best things in my life,” Feross said. “I have friends all over the world now from going to conferences, and I am such a better programmer.”
“And the financial model thing, we are going to figure it out soon, so it might not be a bad time to start if you are thinking about spending even more time on open
source.”
You can listen to the full episode below.
The Changelog 359: Maintainer spotlight! Feross Aboukhadijeh – Listen on Changelog.com