Eh. We’ve always been unpaid. I guess now everyone is noticing because tech companies make billions off of our work.

I don't believe this is a new concept. IIRC, the same claim was made around 20 years ago.

I suspect these things go through cycles like everything else.

We should definitely be paying attention when the developers of critical infrastructure begin to burn out.

I hope the Post Open license will be a part of the solution for this. Free commercial use of opensource should be disallowed.

Pay the people! I pay every time its an option even when its just complimentary with no additional features.

I find it so tricky, too. With the maintainers that I see struggling, it's rarely a lack of contributions that fucks them up, but rather a lack of maintainers. And they can't easily onboard other maintainers, because:

1. there's hardly anyone willing to invest enough time into your project to be a particularly helpful maintainer.
2. everyone's just strangers on the internet, who may or may not want to ship malware as part of your project.

Like, I even have a friend who's excited for a project that I'm building, but so far, they're purely cheerleading (which is appreciated), because they do have projects of their own that they find fun, and in particular also a life outside of programming.
I do not currently struggle with maintainership (because I haven't announced my projects anywhere publicly 🤪), but yeah, it just feels like it's asking for a lot, if I were to try to get that friend on board. In particular also, because not many aspects of maintainership are fun.

maybe spending more money on AI is the solution /s