Overall, open-source participants are still overwhelmingly white, male, and located in the Global North. Stallman stepped down as president of the Free Software Foundation in 2019 (although he returned to the board two years later). Stallman and some other BDFLs have been criticized by their own communities for misogynistic or even abusive behavior. Many open-source projects began with “benevolent dictator for life” ( BDFL) models of governance, where original founders hang on to leadership for years-and not always responsibly.

The fact that open-source software is now so essential means that long-standing leadership and diversity issues in the movement have become everyone’s problems. Over the last two years, while public trust in private technology companies has plummeted, organizations including Google, Spotify, the Ford Foundation, Bloomberg, and NASA have established new funding for open-source projects and their counterparts in open science efforts-an extension of the same values applied to scientific research. Even AWS, Amazon’s money-making cloud arm, supports the development and maintenance of open-source software it committed its portfolio of patents to an open use community in December of last year. The Biden administration’s Securing Open Source Software Act of 2022 publicly recognized open-source software as critical economic and security infrastructure. GitHub, the biggest platform for the open-source community, is used by more than 100 million developers worldwide. Today, 96% of all code bases incorporate open-source software.

Tired open source coders