The open source maintainer community is getting grayer

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 last of twelve key findings. If you want to read all of the results in one place, you can download the full survey report right now.

Since we’ve now fielded this maintainer survey three times in the past four years, we thought it might be interesting to look at some of the overall demographics of the maintainer community, and see if any of these demographics have changed over time.

Is the maintainer population growing older?

Because we’ve seen several articles recently covering the “graying” of open source, we figured with three years of data under our belt, we’d be uniquely positioned to provide a data point to answer whether the open source maintainer community is aging.

And to cut to the punchline, yes, open source maintainers are getting older. 

We plotted out the ages of open source maintainers from the first survey we completed in 2021 through this year’s survey, and what it shows us is that the percentage of maintainers self-reporting that they are 46-55 or 56-65 has doubled since our first survey in 2021 (2021: 11%; 2023: 27%; 2024: 21%). 

Meanwhile, the percentage of maintainers under 26 has dropped precipitously from 25% in our 2021 survey to 12% last year and 10% today.

It would be easy to speculate reasons why the current maintainer population is aging, and new, younger maintainers aren’t coming in to fill the gaps. Perhaps many of the things we’ve learned during the course of this survey report are making being an open source maintainer a less appealing hobby or profession. 

After all, we learned that almost half of maintainers feel underappreciated and like the work is thankless, and many also feel like it adds to their stress and that they are not financially compensated for the work. Almost two-thirds of maintainers have quit or considered quitting their maintenance work. 

It is also possible that existing maintainers who have not quit are continuing to stick with their projects, and the demographic change is simply a result of the age of the open source movement overall, where many maintainers are getting older, but not yet of retirement age, and perhaps we’ll see a youth movement again as they hand over the reins to a new generation of maintainers in the coming years.

Or maybe there is an unsolved challenge related to training new maintainers that needs to be addressed. Perhaps we need more formal mentorship or skills-based-training programs to teach maintainers the necessary skills, especially as the job gets more complex and demands from enterprise users and governments continue to grow.

Other demographic information about the maintainer community

In addition to age, for the first time this year, we asked maintainers how long they’ve been an open source maintainer. Almost half of respondents (45%) have been open source maintainers for more than 10 years. Meanwhile 24% have been maintainers for 6-10 years and 23% have been maintainers for 2-5 years.

Only 7% of respondents reported that they’ve been a maintainer for 1-2 years and 2% reported that they’ve been a maintainer for less than a year, which may be another troubling signal that the current crop of maintainers is aging and not being replaced by a new generation.

We asked about maintainer gender for all three years, and the data there has been mostly consistent. The vast majority of maintainers (85%) identify as male, which is similar to previous years (85% in 2021 and 83% in 2023). 

Only 6% of maintainers identify as female, which is slightly down from 8% in 2021 and 9% in 2023, but probably not statistically significant given the sample size. The percentage of maintainers identifying as non-binary has increased from 1% in 2021 to 2% in 2023 to 3% this year, but again, the sample size is small enough that it would be hard to read much into the data accurately.

And 6% of maintainers prefer not to share their gender, which has been roughly flat over the years (6% in 2021 and 5% in 2023). 

Finally, we once again asked maintainers where in the world they live. One caveat when looking at this data is that we offered to send a free t-shirt to maintainers in North America, South America, Europe, and Australia who filled out the survey 2023 or 2024, while in 2021 we sent t-shirts to maintainers anywhere in the world. This helped skew the 2021 numbers heavily toward Asia.

So this data is helpful for contextualizing the survey data we’ve collected over the years, but may not be representative of the worldwide distribution of open source maintainers.

With that in mind, it is still interesting to see that European countries represent the largest group of open source maintainers (48%), followed by North American maintainers (38%), Asian maintainers (8%), and those from Australia, Oceania, or the Pacific Islands (5%).

Look at that! You’ve made it to the end.

And with that, we’ve reached the final finding of the 2024 state of the open source maintainer report. If you’ve stuck with it all the way until you are reading this, congratulations, and thank you for your interest in our series on this year's report! 

We hope this has been a good use of your time. If you agree, please share this blog post or the full report with others who you think might find it useful as well. If you have questions about the data in the report, find any errors (gasp!), or would otherwise like to discuss the report findings with us, we’d love to hear from you. Email press@tidelift.com with the subject line “2024 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer report” and we’ll route your email to the best people to reply.

Thank you for caring about the state of open source maintainers! They (and we) appreciate you!

Acknowledgements

It takes a team to produce a report of this size, and we want to give special thanks to Lawrence Hecht for his work on survey design, programming, and analysis, plus being an all around great brainstorming partner and helping wrangle the data to uncover the most interesting outcomes. Thanks also to Tatiana Temple for her excellent, detailed, and creative chart design work. 

Many people on the Tidelift team contributed to the report including survey design, writing, project management, editing, and general cat herding. Thanks in particular to Chris Grams, Kanish Sharma, Amy Hays, Caitlin Bixby, Lauren Hanford, Luis Villa, Donald Fischer, Jeremy Katz, Havoc Pennington, Jeremy Rissi, and others who helped along the way.

Finally thanks to the more than 400 open source maintainers who took the time to share their thoughts and make this a useful reference for the state of being an open source maintainer in 2024.