Fixing The Open Source Bus Number

by Holly Cummins

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Holly Cummins Sanne Grinovero Monki Gras - March 19, 2026 Fixing The Open Source Bus Number

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https://xkcd.com/2347

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Distribution of maintainers number of OSS projects https://opensourcesecurity.io/2025/08-oss-one-person/ by Josh Bressers

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Challenges for open source

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Lack of funding

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Lack of time

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Maintainer burnout: doing it on top of a full time job

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Slop PRs make it way worse

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Maintainer boredom

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User boredom

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User hostility (or just lack of appreciation)

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‐ Layoﬀs ‐ Re-assignment Sponsoring company strategy shifts

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Attacks to inject backdoors

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Hostile forks

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Hostile clones

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Lazy clones

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“Build is the New Buy” - - Steve Yegge

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Code has lost its value

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But open source still has value does it? :( :(

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Hardened base components

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Trust

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Secure supply chain

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Familiar to LLMs

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Agents will use your code better if they can read the source

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Community and collaboration, for some of us :)

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“Bag of cats”, tracking down zillions of forks and deciding which to use would be terrible Spec and tests is the hardest part, community maintains these

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What value do maintainers bring?

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Maybe it’s not about code anymore?

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Guardians of quality + performance

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Consistent mission + vision

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- “anti-roadmap” (pushing back is hard when everything is easy, but it’s still important)

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- own the roadmap

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- providing guardrails, applying shared principles to PRs

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- maintain performance

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Maintainers matter.

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What about the bus?

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We have the technology to deal with epistemic debt Losing technical knowledge less of a concern these days

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Epistemic Debt? The unconscious loss of understanding of a project

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Losing keys is still very bad :)

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Losing the mission and understanding of the brand: bad

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Conclusion: The bus is still bad

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How do we ﬁx the bus?

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Money, money, money.

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Long term license guarantees

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Maintenance (people writing code)

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‐ Knowledge ‐ Key sharing Continuity planning

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Trademarks Legal protections

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Experience report How does Quarkus ﬁx the bus?

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Convenient solution: a foundation

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But …

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Solution: A new foundation!

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https://xkcd.com/927/

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Beware Not Invented Here

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The Quarkus Foundation?

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Introducing:

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A legal framework to accept donations

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Unlocks free stuﬀ! ‐ 1Password (for all open source) ‐ Scarf.sh (Commonhaus partnership) ‐ Gradle Develocity (Commonhaus partnership] “Proper OSS” stamp of approval

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‐ trust ‐ continuity Trademark management

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Succession planning

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What if the money runs out?

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No content

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Assets have to go to another non-proﬁt

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A project in a foundation will be open source forever

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Beyond a foundation

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Simple mechanics can help a lot

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Resilience through idiot-prooﬁng

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Resilience through road-paving

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Enrich existing systems to reduce friction

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‐ Common keys ‐ Release scripts ‐ Common Terraform-iness ‐ Org-level privileges to avoid abandon-ware ●

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What helps project survival?

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‐ Consulting services ‐ Commercial support ‐ Extended lifecycle Make proﬁt possible