Webinar recap: top findings from the 2023 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer report

Last week, we hosted a webinar sharing key highlights from the recently unveiled 2023 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer report, which surveyed over 300 open source maintainers. Some highlights include: what maintainers enjoy (and don’t enjoy so much) about being an open source maintainer, the correlation between getting paid and time spent working on open source projects, the support maintainers need to address government and industry standards, and other compelling insights.

If you’d like to read through our findings in detail, you can catch up on each headline below:

1. Despite increasing demands, most maintainers still don’t get paid for their work
2. The more maintainers get paid, the more they work on open source
3. Maintainers are being asked to do more security work. Over 50% didn’t get the memo
4. Maintainers to industry: We don’t have the time nor money to do more
5. In a shocker, paid maintainers do more security and maintenance work than unpaid maintainers
6. Maintainers want to do creative work that matters and makes an impact
7. Open source maintenance can be stressful, lonely, and financially unrewarding
8. Maintainer burnout is real. Almost 60% of maintainers have quit or considered quitting maintaining one of their projects

We’re still rolling out our eleven findings—if you’d like to get notified as future posts come out, please sign up for our blog digest here. Or if you don’t want to wait, download the full survey results today, and watch the webinar for key highlights.

Want to hear about the survey results? Chris Grams will also be discussing these results with Lauren Hanford, VP of Product at Tidelift, Al Gillen, Group VP, software development and open source at IDC, and Seth Larson, maintainer at urllib3, at Upstream, our annual celebration of open source. RSVP for the virtual event on June 7th.