How the World Is Celebrating Open Source Maintainer Month
It’s time to celebrate! May 2025 is the fifth annual Maintainer Month, marked with discounts, events, educational resources and a general celebration of everyone who keeps our favorite projects running.
Created and maintained by GitHub since 2021, its official GitHub repository notes that the open source Maintainer Month is “intended as an industry-wide event… that belongs to anyone who wants to contribute or participate.”
And it’s turned into a myriad of activities — online and off — all trying to convey the message that our open source maintainers are crucial, knowledgeable and appreciated.
Discounts
On social media, GitHub reminded maintainers that its AI-powered coding assistant Copilot is free for them (and to teachers and students), tweeting “Maintainers: you keep the internet running. We’ll cover your Copilot Pro.”
But for Maintainers Month there are also special offers from a variety of other companies, which GitHub described as “a care package for the folks behind our digital infrastructure… perks, tools, and resources from organizations that truly believe in open source.” The Maintainer Month Partner Pack includes 10 different offers available “to any open source maintainer,” according to its official web page. “Just follow the links to claim your perk.” Some of the highlights include:
- Arachne Digital promised free tailored threat reports as well as project-protecting recommendations.
- DevCycle offered a free year of access to its feature management platform.
- The training portal at Linux Foundation Education promised 25% off the full course catalog. (The Cloud Native Computing Foundation notes that includes CNCF-backed training and exams on Kubernetes, Platform Engineering, containers and more.)
- Boot.dev is offering one month of free premium access to their online learning platform.
Happy #MaintainerMonth! 🎉 To celebrate, we’ve launched a special Partner Pack filled with exclusive discounts, freebies, and perks. 🎁 See what’s inside! 👇
http://maintainermonth.github.com/partner-pack— GitHub (@github) May 1, 2025
And there was also a special promotion from GitHub itself — billed as the “Maintainer Month Security Challenge.” Participants who complete three free “GitHub Skills” courses in May — on repository management, supply chains and secret scanning — are eligible to win a free voucher to take the GitHub Advanced Security certification exam. (“Successfully passing the exam will earn you an official GitHub certification that showcases your security expertise!”) “In just a few hours, you’ll pick up real techniques to protect your project,” GitHub wrote in a blog post, “and show the world you’re serious about security.
“Let’s build a safer open source together.”
Education and Funding
Maintainer Month tries to make appreciation take a more tangible form, with efforts to offer free educational resources — as well as actual funding opportunities.
To honor this year’s theme of security, GitHub’s collection of Open Source Guides added a special quick guide on security best practices, everything from protected code branches and vulnerability to some tips on testing and software composition analysis tools.
But they also reminded maintainers that “you don’t have to secure your project alone — we’re here to support you.” There’s a GitHub Secure Open Source Fund that offers funding (with 14 partners), as well as training sessions with experts and access to other researchers and community members “to get your project more secure. We’re completely serious, we will give you money ($10K) to improve your security practices!”
And in honor of Maintainers Month, the Open Source Security Foundation even dedicated an entire episode of its podcast to the fund.
But this year also saw the launch of a new experiment for funding open source maintainers — and became the first Maintainer Month with a special spectacle from the Open Source Pledge. “Launched in October by a core team at Sentry (along with independent developer Vlad-Stefan Harbuz), the pledge urges companies to commit $2,000 for each full-time developer they have on staff “to any open source maintainers or foundations of your choice… Our goal is to establish a new social norm in the tech industry of companies paying open source maintainers, so that burnout and related security issues such as those in XZ and Apache Log4j can become a thing of the past.”
Hello world! We’re here to get OSS maintainers paid and chew bubblegum. And we’re all out of gum.
— Open Source Pledge (@ThePledge) October 8, 2024
Their website now lists 34 participating companies that, in the last year, have paid $2,650,212 to maintainers.
So for Maintainers Month, they staged a celebration right in Times Square — congratulating their 20 newest pledgers on NASDAQ’s eight-story video screen.
Yesterday, @ThePledge was on @Nasdaq Tower in Times Square. I got to be there for it! Thank you to Nasdaq and congratulations to all of the featured companies who #paythemaintainers! 👏 What a great way to keep celebrating #maintainermonth!
— Chad Whitacre (@chadwhitacre_) May 7, 2025
According to their blog post about the event, their goal was “to draw attention to the forward-thinking companies that pay the open source maintainers whose work they depend on, changing the Open Source ecosystem for the better.”
Learning Events
Perhaps there’s a metamessage to this month of celebrations — that all of these maintainers together collectively form a community. Throughout May, Maintainer Month events are happening around the world, with videos of many useful presentations now available on YouTube. GitHub streamed a special event with Jeff Luszcz (from the GitHub Open Source Programs Office) about licensing, SBOMs and security.
“If I had one slide for my whole presentation today it would be this one,” Luszcz told his audience, putting up a slide with a simple piece of advice. “All software (and other assets) needs to have a clear license to be used in an open source project… If you don’t know who owns it — if you don’t know what the license or permission that they’re telling the world ‘Here’s my license, here’s what you have to do’ — if you don’t know that for anything that you’re using, you will not safely or legally be able to use it in your open source project.”
And on Tuesday, May 27, there’ll be an online webinar about the EU Cyber Resilience Act by the Eclipse Foundation’s Open Regulatory Compliance Working Group, “streamed by GitHub as part of Maintainer Month.” (Speakers include Daniel Stenberg, founder/lead developer of the Curl project, as well as Felix Reda, GitHub’s director of policy.)
GitHub is encouraging the open source community to add their events to the official directory, with meetups and webinars happening in countries around the world (including China, India, France and Germany). Also coming up this week:
- In Toronto, Daniel Grechko, from cloud platform Deskree, will be hosting an in-person “Open Source social” on May 28.
- There’s weekly “Open Source Friday” events in Brasil streamed in Portuguese.
A Moment of Visibility
Several other prominent groups are getting involved. The Open Source Initiative described the month as “a time to gather, share knowledge and express appreciation for the people who keep Open Source projects running.” And on Wednesday more than two dozen people turned up for an online town hall of affiliate organizations hosted by OSI community manager Nick Vidal.
In a presentation about their own place in open source ecosystem, he emphasized the OSI’s ongoing role in policy and standards. Among other things, they maintain a database of over 100 OSI-approved licenses. But another role is advocacy — like making sure people understand that Meta’s Llama is not Open Source AI.
Their advocacy also includes gathering feedback from the community, “to make sure that you’re heard, that you have a voice.”
And to that end, he’s especially proud of their “Stories From Maintainers” page. For their contribution to Maintainer Month, the OSI has collected nearly four dozen stories from maintainers to create a moment of visibility, publishing them all as a curated collection at OpenSource.org (with plans to one day publish them all in a maintainer-celebrating book).
There’s a story from Alejandra Gonzalez, who maintains Rust’s linter clippy, offering some advice for maintainers and contributors about security.
Another story came from Alex Gaynor, who’s been an executive at both the Python Software Foundation and the Django Software Foundation, and contributes to the Python Cryptographic Authority libraries. Gaynor’s story ends with a wish that LLMs can one day assist with performing triage on incoming issues.
Screenshot of open source maintainer stories from Nick Vidal’s OSI town hall
There’s even a story from Curl’s Daniel Stenberg, who remembered working “full-time on a project that was just one hundred lines of code in 1996… a small tool for downloading content over HTTP in late 1996.” That project, of course, became the globally popular utility Curl, giving Stenberg’s story some extra authority as he remembers that “those projects of mine were open source from day one as I wanted to contribute to the ever-growing collection of free and useful code out there.”
And he says through the decades he’s kept the same guiding principles: “respect contributors, remain inclusive, lower contribution friction as much as possible, give credits.” As he looks to the future, Stenberg gives his own verdict on the state of open source.
“We need to make it more sustainable, with maintainers and funding. We need to keep improving security in source code, infrastructure, tooling and supply chains.”
And finally: “We need to take care of the maintainers we have. If you can’t complete what you want today, just continue tomorrow or the day after. No stress. Do it for the fun of it…
“Let’s make an awesome Open Source future.”
Nick Vidal posted in the discussion forum at Discuss.OpenSource.org that “reading these stories left me feeling deeply grateful and inspired.”
“Let’s amplify their voices. Together, we can ensure maintainers receive the recognition, support and resources they need — not only in May, but all year long.”
