Fixing The Open Source Bus Number

Open source is a marvellous multiplier which amplifies our collective productivity by allowing us to code on the
shoulders of giants. It has clear benefits for business continuity.

But things can go wrong. Many critical projects have just one or two maintainers (we’ve all seen the xkcd cartoon about
modern digital infrastructure, haven’t we?). Sometimes those maintainers no longer have time, or burn out. At the other
end of the spectrum, even projects with many active contributors can grind to a halt with the contributors all work for
the same employer, and that employer changes their business priorities. Investment can dry up or the licence can change.
After all, the business environment for open source is tough these days.

What can be done?

The classic solution for increasing a team’s bus number is to use pair programming to share knowledge. In the
asynchronous and distributed world of open source, pair programming can work, but it’s harder – and it can’t fix
changing business realities or hostile licence changes.

This talk will discuss some of the strategies used by the Quarkus team to help ensure our open source community is
prepared … for almost anything. These include

- Using GitHub organisations to allow independent contributions with a ‘safety’ backup if maintainers disappear
- Productising dependencies so that anything in the stack can be rebuilt to address vulnerabilities; this helps with
security, and also helps with investment
- Joining the Commonhaus foundation to ensure Quarkus can’t ever be owned by a single company

Some of these have been easy, some have been tough (the logistics of moving to a foundation are not for the
faint-hearted). In this talk, Holly and Sanne will reflect on what’s worked well, what’s transferrable, and how all of
us can be prepared for the future of open source.

Transcript

1. Holly Cummins Sanne Grinovero Monki Gras - March 19, 2026 Fixing The Open Source Bus Number
2. https://xkcd.com/2347
3. Distribution of maintainers number of OSS projects https://opensourcesecurity.io/2025/08-oss-one-person/ by Josh Bressers
4. Challenges for open source
5. Lack of funding
6. Lack of time
7. Maintainer burnout: doing it on top of a full time job
8. Slop PRs make it way worse
10. Maintainer boredom
11. User boredom
12. User hostility (or just lack of appreciation)
13. ‐ Layoffs ‐ Re-assignment Sponsoring company strategy shifts
14. Attacks to inject backdoors
15. Hostile forks
16. Hostile clones
17. Lazy clones
19. “Build is the New Buy” - - Steve Yegge
20. Code has lost its value
21. But open source still has value does it? :( :(
22. Hardened base components
23. Trust
24. Secure supply chain
25. Familiar to LLMs
26. Agents will use your code better if they can read the source
27. Community and collaboration, for some of us :)
28. “Bag of cats”, tracking down zillions of forks and deciding which to use would be terrible Spec and tests is the hardest part, community maintains these
29. What value do maintainers bring?
30. Maybe it’s not about code anymore?
31. Guardians of quality + performance
32. Consistent mission + vision
33. - “anti-roadmap” (pushing back is hard when everything is easy, but it’s still important)
34. - own the roadmap
35. - providing guardrails, applying shared principles to PRs
36. - maintain performance
37. Maintainers matter.
38. What about the bus?
39. We have the technology to deal with epistemic debt Losing technical knowledge less of a concern these days
40. Epistemic Debt? The unconscious loss of understanding of a project
41. Losing keys is still very bad :)
42. Losing the mission and understanding of the brand: bad
43. Conclusion: The bus is still bad
44. How do we fix the bus?
45. Money, money, money.
46. Long term license guarantees
47. Maintenance (people writing code)
48. ‐ Knowledge ‐ Key sharing Continuity planning
49. Trademarks Legal protections
50. Experience report How does Quarkus fix the bus?
51. Convenient solution: a foundation
52. But …
53. Solution: A new foundation!
54. https://xkcd.com/927/
55. Beware Not Invented Here
56. The Quarkus Foundation?
57. Introducing:
59. A legal framework to accept donations
60. Unlocks free stuff! ‐ 1Password (for all open source) ‐ Scarf.sh (Commonhaus partnership) ‐ Gradle Develocity (Commonhaus partnership] “Proper OSS” stamp of approval
61. ‐ trust ‐ continuity Trademark management
62. Succession planning
63. What if the money runs out?
65. Assets have to go to another non-profit
66. A project in a foundation will be open source forever
67. Beyond a foundation
68. Simple mechanics can help a lot
69. Resilience through idiot-proofing
70. Resilience through road-paving
71. Enrich existing systems to reduce friction
73. ‐ Common keys ‐ Release scripts ‐ Common Terraform-iness ‐ Org-level privileges to avoid abandon-ware •
74. What helps project survival?
75. ‐ Consulting services ‐ Commercial support ‐ Extended lifecycle Make profit possible
76. Integrations to vendors
77. Keep it interesting
78. Conclusions
79. Open source is a multiplier
80. Maintainers are the heart of open source
81. Open source is not just “hosted on GitHub”
82. A network of trust is everything
83. https://xkcd.com/2347 (modified)
84. https://hollycummins.com/monkigras-bus-factor/