Open Source Sustainability

Open Source Sustainability

Author: Software Engineering Daily May 14, 2026 Duration: 58:43

Open source software underpins nearly every modern application, including frameworks powering the most popular websites, to the libraries securing financial backend systems. However, while open source drives collaboration and innovation at a global scale, it also faces deep challenges in sustainability, community health, and long-term maintenance. Many of the world’s most critical dependencies are still maintained by just a handful of volunteers.

Abby Cabunoc Mayes leads Open Source Maintainer Programs at GitHub, and Brian Muenzenmeyer is a Principal Engineer, Node.js maintainer, and author of the book, Approachable Open Source. Abby and Brian join Josh Goldberg to talk about what it means to build and sustain healthy open source projects, how maintainers can foster inclusive communities, the evolving role of open source in the workplace, and how AI is reshaping the way we collaborate.

Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O’Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

The post Open Source Sustainability appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.


Dive deep into the conversations that shape how we build and understand complex systems with Data Archives-Software Engineering Daily. This podcast pulls from a rich library of technical discussions, each one a focused exploration into the specific tools, architectures, and challenges that define modern software engineering. Rather than surface-level news, these episodes offer sustained, thoughtful dialogues with the engineers and thinkers who are working on the front lines of data infrastructure, distributed systems, and emerging technologies. You'll hear detailed breakdowns of real-world problems and the nuanced solutions teams are implementing, providing a practical sense of how theoretical concepts translate into production code and resilient platforms. The archive serves as an enduring resource, whether you're looking to grasp the fundamentals of a new database or understand the intricate trade-offs in a system design. Tune in for a consistently substantive listen that treats software engineering with the depth and seriousness it deserves, all through the unfiltered lens of expert conversation.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 50

Software Engineering Daily
Podcast Episodes
Agentic Mesh with Eric Broda [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 47:23
AI agents are evolving from individual productivity tools into distributed systems components inside enterprises. The next frontier is coming into focus, and it involves large-scale ecosystems of collaborating agents emb…
New Relic and Agentic DevOps with Nic Benders [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 46:18
Observability emerged from the need to understand complex software systems, and involves tracking metrics, logs, and traces so engineers can detect and diagnose problems before they affect users. However, modern applicat…
Mobile App Security with Ryan Lloyd [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 54:52
Mobile apps have become a primary interface for critical services, including banking, payments, and healthcare. Unlike web applications, much of the logic and intellectual property in a mobile app lives directly on the u…
FastMCP with Adam Azzam and Jeremiah Lowin [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:06:06
The Model Context Protocol, or MCP, gives developers a common way to expose tools, data, and capabilities to large language models, and it has quickly become an important standard in agentic AI. FastMCP is an open source…
SED News: OpenCode, AI Code vs. Shipped Code, and the LiteLLM Breach [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 56:42
SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this epis…
FreeBSD with John Baldwin [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:03:31
FreeBSD is one of the longest-running and most influential open-source operating systems in the world. It was born from the Berkeley Software Distribution in the early 1990s, it has powered everything from high-performan…
Cilium, eBPF, and Modern Kubernetes Networking with Bill Mulligan [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 57:30
Modern cloud-native systems are built on highly dynamic, distributed infrastructure where containers spin up and down constantly, services communicate across clusters, and traditional networking assumptions break down. L…
Games That Push Back with Bennett Foddy [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:06:33
Bennett Foddy is a legendary game designer known for creating wholly distinctive games such as QWOP, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, and the recently released Baby Steps. He’s also a former professor at the NYU Game…
Prettier and Opinionated Code Formatting with James Long [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 50:35
Developer tooling shapes how software gets written day to day, but the best tools often disappear into the background once they succeed. Formatting, linting, and build systems can either create friction and endless debat…