The Unpaid Volunteers Holding Up the Internet
People Holding Up the Internet
A data visualization reveals that 11 of 23 critical open-source projects—including the time zone database, xz, core-js, sudo, and SQLite—are maintained by just one or two people. Paul Eggert updates the time zone file used by 4 billion phones in his spare time; Lasse Collin's xz was nearly backdoored; Denis Pushkarev coded core-js from a Russian prison. The piece quantifies the fragility of the digital infrastructure we all rely on.
It's also good to keep in mind that this is an unpaid hobby project.
- mentalgear
It's indeed ridiculous how the world's trillion dollar private companies run on essential software that idealistic open-source maintainers build basically for free while scrambling to even make basic income.
I'm all for open ideals, but we shouldn't be as naive to ignore how stuff we build on these ideals - if offered completely free - will eventually almost exclusively profit only those private entities that best know how to use them, hide them in a 'proprietary chain' and use VC capital to invest more in PR, markting and sales than engineering to reap all the benefits off them.
Therefore, I think, the original problem was that most software wasn't automatically defaulting to a limited-commercial (e.g. business of > million revenue must pay for usage in their product) or AGPL licenses that would benefit all - by either allowing maintainers to get a share from the success the helped build, or making the resulting products build on top, instead of private profit, available freely to all.
- brynet
With my OpenBSD developer hat on, getting new hardware in the hands of developers is really important, many of us are hacking on 5-10 year old thinkpads that need replacing.
https://www.openbsd.org/want.html
The OpenBSD foundation is ~23% away from its fundraising goal for 2026, which helps support developer hackathons and project infrastructure, etc.
https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2026.html
Shamelessly, if I may add a personal plea, in addition to funding the open source projects you use, if you can, please do consider directly supporting individual contributors/developers personally who work on those projects, many are volunteers and even a small monthly contribution could mean the difference.
- kabakabakaba
> After that it is Lasse on his own again, and in 2025 he wrote 97 percent of the changes.
The xz story is so depressing. The only person who stepped up to help him was someone trying to plant a backdoor...
- smashed
I'm not sure I like this form of content. It's hard to read and confusing on mobile for little gains. The article seemed interesting though.
- Merkur
It’s not a failure of corporate. It’s a failure of community. Would it be better if all internet infrastructure would be controlled by corporate? I would argue: no, it wouldn’t.
Perhaps It should be NPOs like ISOC or IETF that supports private open source engagement into internet infrastructure ?