Are you familiar with security challenges surrounding open source software? 🤔
In a new interview with Michael Vizard at Techstrong TV, Tidelift CEO and co-founder Donald Fischer, and Sonatype CTO and co-founder Brian Fox explore the impact paying maintainers can have on making the software supply chain more secure. They share evidence from new Tidelift and Sonatype surveys that shows when maintainers are paid, they invest more in keeping their projects secure and reliable.
Early this year, the Harvard Business School set out to approximate the value of open source and found that its value sits at about 8.8 trillion dollars (yes, trillion 😵💫). By comparison, the entire U.S. electrical grid is valued at 1.5- 2 trillion dollars, and the U.S. interstate highway system is valued at 750 billion dollars.
It’s more than safe to say that open source is vital infrastructure in our modern society.
But unlike the electrical grid and the interstate highway system, open source isn’t publicly funded. Yet, we expect open source maintainers to keep their open source projects secure, maintained, and up to industry and government standards.
(At this year’s Upstream, Tidelift co-founder and General Counsel Luis Villa sat down with Frank Nagle, one of the authors of this Harvard Business School study, to discuss how the numbers came to be and what this finding means for open source maintainers and software supply chain security. You can find the link in the comments below.)
In this year’s Tidelift state of the open source maintainer report, we found:
- Bad news, 60% of open source maintainers report being unpaid for their work
- Good news, those who are paid spend more time on their projects and are almost twice as likely to be able to prioritize remediating security vulnerabilities
A direct quote from Brian, “Why can’t we peel off a fraction of a percent of that [the 8.8 trillion value] to help support those very people? When that happens, these things will get solved. Until then, it’s an uphill battle.”
And from Donald, “The number one pain point that maintainers are reporting when we ask them this question [What do you dislike about being an open source maintainer?], is that a lot of folks are making a ton of money using their open source projects and assuming that they’re going to do all of this work to bring it to the enterprise grade, and they’re not getting paid for any of it. And that’s a really straightforward issue for us to solve.”
To hear more about open source supply chain challenges along with findings from the 2024 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer report and from Sonatype's State of the Software Supply Chain report, you can watch the whole interview here 👉 https://lnkd.in/gK8BCw5z
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