Introduction for Maintainers
As the maintainer of an Open Source Project, you are vital to its success. Most people only think about the maintenance of the source code in a Project. But there are many other tasks maintainers are responsible for, including:
- Triaging issues
- Managing the project’s roadmap
- Answering questions from consumers
- Dealing with spam in discussion forums and issue trackers
- Maintaining custom domain registration
- Renewing signing certificates
- Updating dependencies
- Staying on top of security vulnerabilities
- Publishing new releases
And that work isn’t the reason you started writing the Open Source Software in the first place. You started because you wanted to solve a problem, learn something new, or help others. But as your project grows, so does the amount of work required to maintain it.
The Open Source Maintenance Fee
The Open Source Maintenance Fee provides a way to compensate you for the time and effort spent on maintenance by separating the Open Source Software from the Open Source Project.
Specifically, source code (the Software) is free—as in freedom—but the maintenance work (the Project) is not. You collabrate on the Software and you get paid to maintain the Project.
Interested? You can enable the Open Source Maintenance Fee in your project by following these few simple steps.