Is Open Source Sustainable?

We recently tuned into .NET Rocks, a podcast that we really recommend for ANY developer, not just .NET.

The subject was "Sustainable Open Source" with Sarah Novotny (from Microsoft).  It was a very interesting conversation about open source and how heavily reliant a lot of software is on open source projects, but, how sustainable is the open source model?

A lot of open source projects start with people developing a tool, then thinking if it was useful for them, maybe it will be useful for others. But over time, this can end up becoming quite demanding, maintained during free time, and relying on donations.

This conversation between Carl, Richard & Sarah was specifically talking about Sarah's work at Microsoft, developing programs to support open source projects utilized there, but this made me think, what can we, as a development community do to help the open source projects we use on a day to day basis?

1. The obvious one 💸 .

2. We could designate some time, routinely, to take a look into existing GitHub issues & reach out to maintainers and potentially help them.  This one comes with some challenges, a lot of open-source projects are very mature and can be complicated, so my advice on this one would be to start small!

3. Raise Issues! If you find a bug on an open-source project, raise the bug in GitHub, this gives maintainers and contributors the opportunity to identify and fix.  Just make sure you document thoroughly with concise replication steps.

4. Get involved in support forums.  Help fellow developers, this helps maintainers focus on getting stuff done!

5. Suggest documentation changes if inaccurate.  Documenting software is a difficult, time-consuming task.  As a developer, having accurate documentation is also very valuable.