Barriers facing open source projects

Throughout the program, we received feedback on challenges of building open source projects. From managing and building communities, navigating sustainable business models, and evaluating funding with opportunities learned from licensing, governance and community building, there’s a lot of work to be done.

Some of the barriers open source projects encounter:

Maintainer care: many projects are solo-maintainer managed. Managing competing priorities, stakeholders, and time constraints with limited resources leads to risk of maintainer burnout. Community perception: the expectation that maintainers work on their projects full-time, without a clear path to supporting themselves, can result in an untenable situation for maintainers. This results in burnout or unwanted hostility toward maintainers and lost labor towards projects. Measuring impact: for maintainers to find funding, they’re lacking ways to measure the impact of their software, find what companies are using it, and identify who to reach out to about sponsorships. Legal guidance: for projects tackling licensing, commercialization, or breaking new ground with open source machine learning, they need legal advice tailored to the intricacies of open source. Financial advice: information on the pros and cons of different funding paths are limited, and make it hard for maintainers to find the approach that fits their particular needs. Additionally, financial management, accounting, country-dependent reporting and tax requirements, and other complexities require industry-specific accounting experts for projects to be able to handle and dispense money. Technical support: managing workflow and alignment for features, bugs, and other requests against maintenance and security needs is a tough balance with limited resources