In the second finding of the 2024 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer survey, we found that the more maintainers are paid, the more improvements they make to their projects.
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In the previous finding, we reported that 60% of maintainers describe themselves as unpaid hobbyists, and 36% of maintainers describe themselves as paid (professional or semi-professional) maintainers, earning some or all of their income from their open source work.
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When you break down the paid maintainers into professional (earning most or all of their income from their maintenance work) and semi-professional (earning some of their income from maintaining projects), it becomes clear that the amount of money a maintainer is making for their work has a large impact on the types of improvements they are able to make. Across nearly all major categories, professional maintainers are on average over 20 percentage points more likely to make key improvements to their projects than semi-professional maintainers.
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In the previous study, 81% percent of professional maintainers earning most or all of their income from maintaining projects spend more than 20 hours a week maintaining their projects. This year, the percentage was nearly identical (82%).
Conversely, in last year’s survey, we found that the vast majority of unpaid hobbyists spend ten hours or less per week on their maintenance work (81%). This percentage also stayed consistent in this year’s survey, with 78% of unpaid hobbyist maintainers working ten hours or less per week.
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We’ve heard from many maintainers that how they are paid for their work also matters. For many maintainers there is a huge difference between getting a one-time “airdrop” of money, perhaps right after a high profile incident where people are paying attention to their projects, compared to ongoing recurring income that they can count on. So this year for the first time we asked maintainers to tell us whether they would prefer to get predictable monthly income or a one-time lump payment.
An overwhelming majority of maintainers prefer to receive predictable monthly income, with 81% choosing that option.
They are great to have both to confirm what we think we know and they occasionally result in surprising discoveries! In this case though, the headline made it sound like a surprising discovery.