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The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Maintainers report offers a close look at the work and pressures facing maintainers of selected critical projects. Its findings come from interviews with 32 maintainers—not a representative survey of the open-source ecosystem—so the percentages describe those interviewees, not all maintainers or projects.
What is the Open Source Maintainers 2023 report?
Open Source Maintainers: Exploring the people, practices, and constraints facing the world’s most critical open source software projects was authored by Alex Salkever, with a foreword by Shuah Khan, and published by Linux Foundation Research in July 2023. The study used detailed qualitative interviews with 32 “super maintainers” from projects identified among the top 200 critical open-source projects. It examines how people become maintainers, how projects grow, and how maintainers balance community needs with sustainable working lives. Read the report.
That scope matters: this is an interview-based inquiry into maintainers associated with selected high-criticality projects. It is not a random sample of repositories or maintainers, and its percentages should not be read as prevalence estimates for open source as a whole.
What did the report find?
The figures below are percentages of the 32 interviewees, as reported in the Linux Foundation Research report. They are descriptive results from that interview group, not percentages of all open-source maintainers or projects.
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| Topic | Finding among interviewees |
|---|---|
| Role | 75% served both as project maintainers and code contributors. |
| Employment | 62% were employed full-time to work on their projects. |
| Employer support | 38% felt a high degree of support from their employers for their open-source work. |
| Organizational value | 39% felt open-source software work was highly valued at their organization. |
| Formal diversity, equity, and inclusion program | Less than one-third said their project had one. |
| Formal mentorship program | 34% said their project had one. |
| New-contributor recruitment process | 53% said their project had a formal process. |
| New-contributor pipeline | 35% said their project had a strong pipeline. |
Taken together, the responses describe work that extends beyond writing code: maintainers also coordinate contributions, support communities, and handle administrative responsibilities. The gap between having a formal recruitment process and describing a pipeline as strong also highlights that a defined process and a reliably growing contributor base are different things.
How can projects recruit contributors without exhausting maintainers?
The report’s practical advice comes from interviewees’ experiences. It should be treated as guidance, not controlled evidence that any single practice will cause better retention or project health.
Make contribution easier to enter
- Balance attention to code vulnerabilities with operational work such as finding and welcoming new contributors.
- Respond to pull requests in a timely way. Interviewees warned that delayed responses can discourage people who are trying to contribute.
- Recognize contributions publicly. A mention on social media or acknowledgment during a community call can encourage people to take on difficult work.
Use automation without removing human contact
Automation can help a project handle work at greater scale and provide faster responses, while maintainers retain the personal interaction that helps contributors feel supported. The report summarizes the balance this way: “Embrace automation. While it does not replace the human touch, it does provide key benefits such as scale and instant response times.”
Set boundaries around ongoing work
- Accept that open-source work is never truly finished; define what can reasonably be handled rather than treating every request as urgent.
- Set limits on communication and work hours, and take breaks.
- Automate recurring workflows where practical.
- Be cautious about unpaid projects that impose excessive administrative burdens.
These recommendations frame sustainability as a project-design issue as well as an individual one: contributor support, routine operations, and maintainers’ capacity all compete for time.
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How representative are the findings?
The study’s small, selected interview group limits what can be inferred beyond the people interviewed. CHAOSScast Episode 73, “Reflections on the LF OSS Maintainer Report,” published November 2, 2023, discussed questions about the sample size, representativeness, use of percentages in an interview-based study, and possible bias toward technical contributors. Those are critiques raised in the discussion, not changes to the report’s stated method. Listen to the CHAOSScast discussion.
The report is a July 2023 snapshot. Its figures should not be presented as current 2026 conditions. The available evidence here does not establish how common these practices or experiences are across all projects, or how they have changed since publication.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Who authored the report?
Alex Salkever authored the report, and Shuah Khan wrote its foreword. Khan, identified as a Linux Foundation Fellow and maintainer, writes: “Open source always has been and will be about the people who take the risk and make the projects happen.”
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