It is time for the third installment Tidelift state of the open source maintainer survey!
Do you actively maintain one or more open source projects? If so, we'd love to learn from you.
The reports that come out of the Tidelift maintainer survey have become an important industry resource cited in hundreds of articles and studies over the past few years. We want to ensure your voice is represented in our 2024 state of the open source maintainer report.
The data we collect will help Tidelift better support open source maintainers like you and make the case for getting you the resources you need to continue maintaining healthy and secure open source projects.
We appreciate your time, and after taking a moment to share your thoughts, we'd like to thank you with a few cool perks!
All open source maintainers who fill out the survey will receive our brand new 2024 pay the maintainers t-shirt. If you are already working as a lifter for Tidelift (or apply to lift a project and are accepted as a new lifter), we'll send you the t-shirt AND a custom Tidelift lifter hoodie (learn more about how lifting a project works here).
Here’s a preview of what we’re interested in learning this year
We’re curious how things have changed since we conducted the 2023 survey at the end of 2022. Are more maintainers earning money? If so, where is it coming from? And if not, what additional work would you be willing to do if you were getting paid? What’s motivating you to keep working on your projects? What is holding you back from doing your best work? Has anything changed in the way you approach your maintenance work since xz utils? Has AI had an impact?
More about our maintainer surveys
We released the first maintainer survey report back in 2021 and the second in 2023. Check out the top headlines from last year’s report:
- Despite increasing demands, most maintainers don’t get paid for their work
- The more maintainers get paid, the more they work on open source
- In a shocker, paid maintainers do more security and maintenance work than unpaid maintainers
- Maintainers want to do creative work that matters and makes an impact
- Open source maintenance can be stressful, lonely, and financially unrewarding
- Almost 60% of maintainers have quit or considered quitting maintaining one of their projects
Your submissions to this survey are covered by the Tidelift privacy policy. If you are interested in the custom Tidelift lifter hoodie or the pay the maintainers t-shirt, make sure to share your contact information at the end of the survey. If you are not a maintainer partner, we can only ship t-shirts to North America, Europe, South America, and Australia (we're sorry!), but we would still love to hear from you.
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