The Silent Crisis in Open Source: When Maintainers Walk Away
July 10, 2024
In May 2022, Dane Springmeyer, the primary maintainer of node-pre-gyp, a critical tool in the Node.js ecosystem, announced his decision to step down. This wasn’t just another developer moving on; for nearly a decade he had been maintaining the project.
Despite outlining the urgency and the need for community involvement to keep the project maintained, proposing several options for the future of the project, and emphasizing the importance of maintaining or gracefully deprecating node-pre-gyp to avoid disruptions, it wasn’t resolved until very recently.
Source: The Silent Crisis in Open Source: When Maintainers Walk Away – DEV Community
When you run NPM think of how much code you rely on just magically shows up. Much of it open source. But little do many of us, in particular massive, profitable corporations, contribute to these code they rely on?
It’s long been clear this is not a sustainable political economy, and recent incidents like the acquisition by malicious actors of polyfill.io (and other such attacks) only make that clearer.
