alt Hacker NewsThe people holding up the internet
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With my OpenBSD developer hat on, getting new hardware in the hands of developers is really important, many of us are hacking on 5-10 year old thinkpads that need replacing.
https://www.openbsd.org/want.html
The OpenBSD foundation is ~23% away from its fundraising goal for 2026, which helps support developer hackathons and project infrastructure, etc.
https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2026.html
Shamelessly, if I may add a personal plea, in addition to funding the open source projects you use, if you can, please do consider directly supporting individual contributors/developers personally who work on those projects, many are volunteers and even a small monthly contribution could mean the difference.
> After that it is Lasse on his own again, and in 2025 he wrote 97 percent of the changes.
The xz story is so depressing. The only person who stepped up to help him was someone trying to plant a backdoor...
I'm not sure I like this form of content. It's hard to read and confusing on mobile for little gains. The article seemed interesting though.
A specific screw in a car can be crucial, but at the same time it's cheep, replaceable and easy to reproduce. When describing the achievement of a car you would never put this particular screw at the top.
I don't mean that the achievement of those people is unimportant, but dislike when people mix up the idea of "dependence out of convenience" vs "dependence out of necessity".
It’s not a failure of corporate. It’s a failure of community. Would it be better if all internet infrastructure would be controlled by corporate? I would argue: no, it wouldn’t.
Perhaps It should be NPOs like ISOC or IETF that supports private open source engagement into internet infrastructure ?
This page has a11y problems. Reader mode fixes those but hides all the graphics, only text and pictures remain. Such a waste of an otherwise good article.
I'm working on something similar for a PyCon talk.
While I agree that there is a problem of recognition and appreciation, I also feel like the spirit of making a small contribution without expecting a return is what enables the open whole source ecosystem that many of us benefit from.
And Gijs Kruitbosch / Richard Ziade/Chris Dary/others? who gave us reader mode.
It is so sad, I wish I could make big corporations support them
I loved this - high quality content and the sort of info I wouldn’t chance across myself
I so so so love this! Thank you for putting effort into communicating this crucial information.
What I’m curious about is, then, how should this problem be handled? Actually, there’s a point I’m somewhat curious about. For projects with a bus factor of 1 or very low, and in a supply chain like this, there’s a somewhat difficult point regarding what kind of system should be established so that the core developers maintaining that kind of core receive appropriate compensation.
That’s true, after all. Technically very new or challenging technologies get the spotlight from many people, but these technologies are very important yet are a kind of engine technology that is less visible... I’m curious how this should be identified or selected.
That said, if you set up a committee, the committee could also become an inner circle based on their personal connections.
I had Claude whip up Fundcli a bunch of months ago. It goes through your atuin shell history and suggests places to donate to based on what you've been using.
These people aren't holding up the Internet. The software they built is doing that.
It's like how your house isn't its blueprint.
Writing software isn't the same as running it. Software maintenance work doesn't scale with the size of the user base.
For software you don't operate yourself, the scaling factors have nothing to do with where it runs or why or when. You're isolated from the number of installs, since you don't operate those installs, you don't keep them updated or bring them back when they go down. That burden is borne by vendors.
Sensationalist takes are great for clicks, but there is no "there" there. If this was a true economic failure it'd have been fixed long ago.
My bet is these maintainers aren't in it for the money. After all they're not currently dead of starvation, so by definition they're okay. Not billionaires, but okay.
And that's okay! Not everyone wants to be a billionaire. Some people just wanna be that person in Nebraska thanklessly keeping the planet on axis.
This article is biased towards open source developers and ignores all the employees at tier 1 backbones who are the ones actually holding up the internet.
It's indeed ridiculous how the world's trillion dollar private companies run on essential software that idealistic open-source maintainers build basically for free while scrambling to even make basic income.
I'm all for open ideals, but we shouldn't be as naive to ignore how stuff we build on these ideals - if offered completely free - will eventually almost exclusively profit only those private entities that best know how to use them, hide them in a 'proprietary chain' and use VC capital to invest more in PR, markting and sales than engineering to reap all the benefits off them.
Therefore, I think, the original problem was that most software wasn't automatically defaulting to a limited-commercial (e.g. business of > million revenue must pay for usage in their product) or AGPL licenses that would benefit all - by either allowing maintainers to get a share from the success the helped build, or making the resulting products build on top, instead of private profit, available freely to all.