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The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Maintainers report is a July 2023 qualitative study based on detailed interviews with 32 “super maintainers” from projects identified among the 200 most critical open-source projects. It shows that maintaining important software involves far more than reviewing code: maintainers recruit and mentor contributors, coordinate communities, satisfy employers, handle administration, and manage burnout risks. Its percentages describe those 32 interviewees—not the entire open-source ecosystem.
What the report studied
Alex Salkever authored Open Source Maintainers: Exploring the people, practices, and constraints facing the world’s most critical open source software projects, with a foreword by Linux Foundation Fellow and maintainer Shuah Khan. Published in July 2023, the report uses detailed qualitative interviews rather than a representative survey.
The participants were selected from projects considered among the top 200 critical open-source projects. That focus makes the report useful for understanding high-impact projects, but it also limits what can be inferred about smaller repositories, non-technical contributors, or maintainers outside that selection.
Khan’s foreword captures the report’s people-centered premise: “Open source always has been and will be about the people who take the risk and make the projects happen.”
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What the 32 interviewees reported
The infographic figures below are percentages of the 32 people interviewed. They are descriptive findings from this sample, not prevalence estimates for all maintainers or projects.
| Practice or condition | Share of interviewees | What the figure means |
|---|---|---|
| Serve as both maintainers and code contributors | 75% | Three quarters said they maintain projects while also contributing code. |
| Employed full-time to work on their projects | 62% | Nearly two thirds had full-time employment centered on their projects. |
| High employer support for open-source work | 38% | Fewer than four in ten felt strongly supported by their employers. |
| Open-source software highly valued by the organization | 39% | Organizational recognition was reported by a minority of interviewees. |
| Formal diversity, equity and inclusion program | Less than one-third | Most interviewees did not report a formal DEI program in their project. |
| Formal mentorship program | 34% | About one in three projects represented in the interviews had formal mentorship. |
| Formal new-contributor recruitment process | 53% | A small majority reported a defined recruitment process. |
| Strong new-contributor pipeline | 35% | Only about one third described the pipeline as strong. |
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Make the first contribution easier
The report treats contributor growth as operational work, not an occasional outreach campaign. Projects need an explicit path for finding, onboarding and retaining people. A recruitment process may exist on paper while the actual pipeline remains weak, as the difference between the 53% reporting a formal process and the 35% reporting a strong pipeline illustrates.
Respond to pull requests promptly
Interviewees identified delayed responses as behavior that can discourage new contributors. A timely review, even when a full decision is not possible, tells a contributor that their work has been seen and explains what happens next. Projects can set review ownership, use issue labels and publish contribution guidance so requests do not disappear in an inbox.
Recognize work publicly
The report recommends acknowledging contributors through a public mention, a community call or another visible thank-you. Recognition can signal that difficult maintenance work matters and may encourage people to take on responsibility. It should complement, not replace, substantive review and respectful communication.
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Only 34% of interviewees reported a formal mentorship program, and fewer than one third reported a formal DEI program. Those findings do not prove that projects without formal programs are exclusionary, but they show how often support depends on informal effort by already-busy maintainers.
A practical response is to document an onboarding path, identify mentors or office-hour hosts, explain codes of conduct and escalation routes, and make participation expectations visible. Formal structures also make it easier to see when support is unavailable rather than assuming newcomers will find the right person themselves.
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Automation should increase scale, not remove people
The report’s infographic states: “Embrace automation. While it does not replace the human touch, it does provide key benefits such as scale and instant response times.” In practice, automation can handle repetitive checks, acknowledgments, labeling, reminders and routine status updates, allowing maintainers to spend more time on architecture, judgment and community care.
Automation needs clear ownership and escape routes. A bot that closes issues without explanation or produces noisy notifications can create the same friction it was meant to remove. Keep human review for security decisions, sensitive community interactions and exceptions, and explain automated actions in contributor-facing documentation.
Employer support and the hidden workload
Although 62% of interviewees were employed full-time to work on their projects, only 38% felt a high degree of employer support, while 39% said open-source work was highly valued in their organization. The contrast suggests that being paid to work on a project does not automatically mean maintenance labor is recognized, protected or sustainable.
Maintenance includes release coordination, triage, documentation, conflict resolution, incident response and contributor development alongside coding. Organizations that depend on open source can make that work legible by allocating time, recognizing it in performance goals, funding travel or community work where appropriate, and planning coverage for leave.
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Set communication boundaries
Interviewees advised setting boundaries around communication and working hours. Publish expected response windows, rotate on-call duties where possible, and distinguish urgent security matters from ordinary feature discussion.
Take breaks and plan continuity
Open-source work is never finished. Planned breaks, documented responsibilities and backup maintainers reduce the pressure for one person to remain permanently available. A project should know who can merge, cut a release or communicate during an absence.
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Automate and decline unsustainable administration
Automation can reduce repetitive work, but the report also warns against unpaid projects carrying excessive administrative burdens. Saying no to low-value process, narrowing scope or finding organizational support may be necessary maintenance decisions rather than signs of weak commitment.
How to interpret the evidence
This is a focused interview study, not a census. CHAOSScast’s discussion of the report raised questions about the small sample, the use of percentages in an interview-based study, possible bias toward technical contributors and whether identifiable participants might have limited what they shared. Those are interpretive cautions about the published method, not replacements for its findings.
The report is also a July 2023 snapshot. Its figures should not be presented as current 2026 rates, and they should not be generalized to every open-source project. The strongest use of the report is as a set of questions for project health: Who handles onboarding? How quickly do contributors receive responses? Which work is recognized by employers? What happens when the primary maintainer needs time away?
A practical checklist for project leaders
- Document a first-contribution path with prerequisites, labels and review expectations.
- Assign responsibility for pull-request triage and acknowledge submissions promptly.
- Offer named mentors, office hours or another repeatable support channel.
- Publish codes of conduct, DEI commitments and escalation procedures.
- Automate routine checks and updates while preserving human review for judgment-heavy cases.
- Recognize maintenance, documentation and community work—not only new code.
- Define communication hours, escalation rules and backup coverage.
- Track whether recruitment produces active contributors, not merely applications or sign-ups.
What the report does—and does not—establish
It establishes how 32 maintainers from selected high-criticality projects described their roles, support systems and constraints in 2023. It does not rank projects, validate a single best workflow, identify a required software product or demonstrate that any one intervention causes better retention or project health. Its value is practical: it makes the often-invisible human and organizational work of maintaining critical open source harder to ignore.
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