Summary

If your goal is to have a successful, sustainable open source project, thinking about how you develop your project leadership over time is crucial. As we spoke about in Chapter 2, What Makes a Good Open Source Project?, and Chapter 5, Governance and Hosting Models, end users look at how a project is run as much as the code itself. A project might have an amazing code base, be technically innovative, and solve the exact problem an end user is looking to solve, but to use it as a critical part of their infrastructure, they will want to make sure this project is maintained for years to come. As a maintainer today, that might not seem like a big deal, but after years of maintaining a code base, answering questions, fixing issues, and doing releases, being a maintainer can lose its luster. The only way to make a project sustainable for the long term is by bringing new maintainers into the project regularly.

One of the main stressors on maintainers, as well as open source projects...