Trapped in the Open Source Supply Chain
summary
Open source maintenance often feels like unpaid infrastructure work with surprising concrete failures: OpenSSL runs on a $2,000 annual budget until Heartbleed forces corporate emergency funding, left-pad is 11 lines that break thousands of builds, and the event-stream npm handoff becomes an event-stream compromise that tries to push malicious code. Projects like Babel scale to stadium-sized users while a handful of maintainers juggle hundreds of packages; funding via donations and Patreon exists but rarely offsets attention costs, so burnout and commodification persist.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Open source maintainership
- 2:00Open source infrastructure
- 4:50Project types and obligations
- 7:35Guilt in maintenance
- 9:19From toy to stadiums
- 12:31Closed collaboration backlash
- 14:15Cute puppy syndrome
- 16:39Maintainers judged by graphs
- 18:24Commodification of work
- 21:37Joy and burden of coding
- 23:46Trapped in supply chain
- 25:13Call for change
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