Funding for OSS projects is typically dire. In 2019, developer André Staltz collected data from Open Collective and GitHub to assess project revenues. Over 50 per cent of projects couldn t sustain their maintainers above the poverty line, while 31 per cent generated enough for a salary considered unacceptable in the industry.
The sample size was small (58), but that made these results even more illuminating. It comprised relatively large projects, most with at least one full-time contributor. For each of these, there are thousands of other projects that are smaller, but still critical for at least one company somewhere.
Projects foundational to the health of the internet are often alarmingly undersupported. In her 2016 report on open-source sustainability for the Ford Foundation, Nadia Eghbal documented the plight of the OpenSSL project, on which thousands of companies and applications rely.