Open Source Sustainability

Open source software underpins nearly every modern application, including frameworks powering the most popular websites to the library securing financial back end systems. However, while open source drives dependencies are still maintained by just a handful of volunteers. Abby Kabunock Maze leads open source maintainer programs at GitHub, and Brian Munzenmeyer is a principal engineer, Node. Js maintainer, and author of the book Approachable Open Source. Abby and Brian join Josh Goldberg to talk about what it means to build and sustain healthy open source projects, how maintainers can foster inclusive communities, the evolving role of open source in the workplace, and how AI is reshaping the way we collaborate. This episode is hosted by Josh Goldberg, an independent full time open source developer. Josh works on projects in the TypeScript ecosystem, most notably TypeScript ESLint, a powerful static analysis toolset for JavaScript and TypeScript. He is also the author of the O'Reilly Learning TypeScript book, a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and a cofounder of SquiggleComp, a conference for excellent web developer tooling. Find Josh on Blue Sky, fostidon, and .com as Joshua k Goldberg. With me today are Abby Cabanak Maze, who runs the open source maintainer programs at GitHub, and Brian Munzenmeyer, principal engineer, Node. Js maintainer, and author of Approachable Open Source. Abby and Brian, welcome to Software Engineering Daily. Hey. Thanks for having us. Thank you. I'm excited to talk to you two about open source and books, GitHub. Abby, can you start off telling us who you are, how you came to lead the OS maintainer programs at GitHub? Yeah. So, hi. My name is Abby. I live in Toronto, Canada. Go j's go. A little bit sad. But I actually started my career writing cancer research software, and that was really meaningful work for me. My grandmother had passed away from cancer, so I felt like my work was really helping other people's grandmothers. And that's when I really saw the power of open source. Like, the software I was using enabled these researchers in Japan to collaborate with data scientists in The UK. And, like, this is how we do real innovation and how we really solve the world's biggest problems. So that's when I shifted to thinking about how can I help more scientists do open source? So I joined Mozilla Science Lab when they launched. And for a long time I was, like, just helping the open science community just collaborate better and do more open source. Slowly, my role shifted to be more about open source generally, and that's when I joined GitHub because I think this is the best place to be to really help the open source community during this critical time, especially with sustainability, we'll we'll be talking about soon. But how can this community really thrive and lead to a strong ecosystem where we can actually rely on open source together as a global world and just have the best innovation that we need. So, …