Open source infrastructure is like 75% maintained by people like me who tried to build an adventure game in their teens but found out that there was no good memory allocator for that (or whatever), and instead ended up holding the hot potato of malloc (or whatever) for 25 years.

At the time that we had to build our mallocs and our network engines and what have you, it was a fun building block to create. But these things need to be maintained *forever*, which means you need a constant influx of fresh volunteers, or eventually the projects become moribund.

New coders today trying to build cool stuff don't need to build this type of infrastructure today—it all exists already! I mean, arguably, even when I was getting started, 20 years ago, this was already happening, it's not like I built Python from scratch, or Linux, or Xorg.

But people working on open source infrastructure at that time mostly felt like… well, other people will try building *their* applications, and then they'll come help us out maintaining the infrastructure, obviously it's not *done* and we can all help each other out!

But each layer that's "done enough" makes it so that people working above it don't really see it any more. And now there are a *lot* of layers that are "done enough". Most people building new apps just treat the infrastructure as sufficient, or at least, immutable.

So I occasionally worry about where our next generation of volunteers is going to come from. One day all the maintainers of all the current pillars of the internet are just going to retire, or die, and everyone left will find that their castles are built on sand.

I think a lot of maintainers feel sort of stuck. If you look at the backstory of any given project, very few are like "I just had a burning passion to build a CMS", or whatever. They always start with an application: "I wanted to build a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan site"

This isn't going to happen for the big stuff; Linux and libc and GCC and Wordpress are all going to be just fine. But there's a *lot* of lower-profile connective tissue on the Internet that is just completely overlooked, and needs to be maintained, basically forever.

I just don't see Github Sponsors, or Tidelift, or anyone really, actually *succeeding* at making these sorts of communities sustainable. Sometimes that one maintainer can make a living, but they're not starting a company or a nonprofit that becomes sustainable and thriving.

Because more importantly than "where is the money coming from" is *where are the people coming from*. The money's just a proxy for that, but if you don't have a ready and interested talent pool, money's not going to do you a lot of good.

No fun conclusion on this thread either, I'm afraid. If I knew where this was going it'd be on my blog.

Thanks for all the engagement everybody, check out my Soundcloud at https://github.com/glyph  for my single "why am I still holding this 20-year-old potato (and how is it still so hot)"