Another day, another article about open source sustainability. After years of reading such posts (including some of my own), I know the formula: Everyone uses open source, some open source is written by solo maintainers who struggle to pay the rent, which puts us all at risk, so that must change.
But too often that “must change” devolves into “solutions” that rely on a “tip jar” gig economy that Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) CTO Chris Aniszczyk rightly questions. Open source contributors need to get paid for their work. Code-and-pray-for-pay schemes are a poor substitute for a steady paycheck.
