Open Source Maintainers Build the Web and Earn Almost Nothing (opens in new tab)

The simple version A handful of unpaid or underpaid developers maintain software that powers trillion-dollar companies. Those companies pay almost nothing for it. How this actually works In 2021, a security researcher discovered a vulnerability in Log4j, a Java logging library maintained largely by a small group of volunteers. The flaw was critical, affecting hundreds of millions of devices and systems. The ensuing panic cost companies enormous amounts in emergency patching and incident respo...