The pattern is now grimly familiar: a project becomes popular, gains millions of users, companies quietly depend on it, and maintainers keep it alive in their spare time until funding either stagnates or disappears entirely. Vuetify is the latest example, but the same story has played out across frontend, backend, tooling, and infrastructure projects.
The FakerJS maintainer argues that the core problem is structural. Funding is treated as optional — optional for companies using the software, optional for individual users, optional for the ecosystem as a whole. But the work itself is not optional. Maintainers still need to review pull requests, triage issues, fix security vulnerabilities, keep dependencies updated, and make stable releases.
When funding is optional but work is constant, the result is predictable: burnout, abandonment, or stagnation. The maintainer notes that relying purely on donations, sponsorships, or platforms like Open Collective has proven insufficient for most projects that lack the profile of something like Linux or PostgreSQL.