Open-source is running out of runway

A post from Founders and Fund argues the open-source model is hitting a wall. The core idea is simple: the people maintaining the libraries, frameworks, and tools that power the internet are underpaid and overworked. They keep the lights on for a system that profits far beyond what the maintainers take home. The post says the model needs a rethink — not because the code is bad, but because the economics are broken.

This isn't a new complaint, but it's one that keeps resurfacing and keeps getting ignored. The maintainers are often one or two people — sometimes a cousin who learned to code and keeps a repo alive between day jobs. They're the ones who patch the vulnerabilities while the big companies ship features on top. When a library gets abandoned, whole stacks break. We've seen it happen: a popular package stops updating, a critical dependency is left dangling, and suddenly a dozen small shops are scrambling to fork it or rewrite it.

The post doesn't lay out a clean fix, but the direction is clear. The people who keep open-source alive need better compensation — whether through grants, bounties, foundations, or direct employer sponsorship. The current setup lets the industry free-ride. The fix is to stop treating maintenance as a hobby and start paying for it like the infrastructure it is.

Why this matters for us: the tools we depend on — from the frameworks our devs use to the libraries our apps run on — are held together by people who can't afford to keep going, and when they stop, our work breaks with them.