TLDR: The project is seen as mature, employers don't prioritise maintaining things and we're struggling for maintainers and help with day to day work
Open source projects survive, not just through development work and contributions of new features but through a whole load of "unglamorous" day to day "admin" work. This may be tracking down a regression, triaging failing builds, making a release of a component, reviewing a patch, documenting something or many other activities. I love the fact we have active contributions, particularly for new features but we are continuing to struggle in many of the other areas above. I am extrememly grateful for the help we do receive with these tasks! As a project we have automated an absolute ton of things, we can test changes in ways we could only dream of a few years ago but maintaining this automation, tracking down regressions and ensuring it all stays working does have a cost. I am worried, not just about the core of the project, but the wider layer ecosystem since "layer maintainer" isn't seen as a particularly interesting career enabling focus by employers and it seems a lot of this work isn't being recognised. Internal business pressures are often continually being prioritised over this. The YP+OE ecosystem is becoming more mature and this means we have our experienced developers being pulled away to new things and few people are replacing them so it feels like we're seeing a gradual skills drain/fade. There are a few things companies can do to help: a) Publicly acknowledge you use the project. I'm often asked where the project is being used but I find it hard to point at companies using it, or products developed with it. It does help to be able to point at real users rather than theoretical scenarios. We *know* it is used in some interesting places but many won't let us say that publicly. https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/Project_Users b) Embrace employee's Open Source contributions, code and otherwise If companies can find ways to recognise the value of having open source experts/leaders working for them from a career development and reward perspective, that would encourage people to do the important work needed c) Consider Yocto Project membership https://www.yoctoproject.org/ecosystem/members/ https://www.yoctoproject.org/join/ We're finding that some infrastructure and roles need to be centrally funded as the work is important but no one company is willing to commit people to it. We're only able to to this through project membership which supports things like the autobuilder, LTS, our build triage process and my own role. d) Support employees in spending some time on open source projects I hear quite often that employees get XX% time to spend on open source projects. I also hear they get pulled onto mission critical product deliverables and can't prioritise that other project work. Finding ways to ensure employees can spend time on open source projects including management support would help a lot. e) Transition roles If someone has a key role in a project but is moving to new things, help them find a replacement and allow them time to train/transition to that new person. Some companies do this really well, I'd call out NI and opkg maintainership as a particularly good exmaple. I appreciate these are difficult times, both for individuals and for businesses. I'd like to conclude by thanking everyone who does participate and contribute. Whilst I do want/need to highlight the above (and have been asked to do so that people have something they can point people at), the project is proving to be successful, going to interesting places and making things possible we can all be proud of! Cheers, Richard
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