Why Open Source Still Matters in 2024

Every year, someone predicts the death of open source. Every year, open source buries the prediction. But 2024 feels different — not because open source is dying, but because the conditions sustaining it are quietly shifting beneath our feet.

The Invisible Infrastructure

The internet runs on open source. Linux powers the servers. Apache and Nginx serve the pages. PostgreSQL stores the data. OpenSSL encrypts the connections. These projects are maintained by a surprisingly small number of contributors — often unpaid — who collectively hold up billions of dollars of commercial infrastructure.

Most of the code running the modern world was written by people who will never be famous for writing it. The XZ Utils backdoor scare of 2024 was a wake-up call. A single maintainer, burned out and under-resourced, was targeted by a sophisticated social engineering attack that came within a hair's breadth of embedding a backdoor in half the world's Linux distributions.

What Needs to Change

Sustainable funding models for critical infrastructure projects. Better tooling for maintainer health and burnout prevention. Corporate accountability for the open source they extract value from.

Open source isn't a charity. It's an ecosystem. And like all ecosystems, it only thrives when its participants give as much as they take.