The Hidden Cost of Open Source Waste  ## Metadata - Author: [[Mitchell Johnson]] - Full Title: The Hidden Cost of Open Source Waste - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: [#open-source, #software-sustainability, #waste, #governance] - #open-source - #sustainability - #waste Author: Jennifer Riggins Source: The New Stack Reference: [The Hidden Cost of Open Source Waste](https://thenewstack.io/the-hidden-cost-of-open-source-waste/) date created: 2025-05-16 20:40 --- # Title: The Hidden Cost of Open Source Waste ## Table of Contents: - [📝 Summary](#📝-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#📖-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#🗒️-notes) - [📖 References](#📖-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#🗣️-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#📰-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#✅-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#🧪-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#📊-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#❓-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#🔮-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#💡-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#🧠-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#📊-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#🌍-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#✅-logical-validity) - [🔍 DARVO Analysis](#🔍-darvo-analysis) - [🔍 SEO Evaluation](#🔍-seo-evaluation) - [🎯 Conclusion](#🎯-conclusion) --- ## 📝 Summary: Jennifer Riggins’ article, "The Hidden Cost of Open Source Waste," explores the often-overlooked downsides of open-source software: duplication, abandonment, and unsustainable development practices. While open source is usually celebrated for innovation and collaboration, Riggins argues that a lack of coordination and governance can result in wasted resources, burnout among maintainers, and a glut of similar or abandoned projects. The article calls for more strategic oversight, sustainable funding, and community-wide standards to maximize the benefits and minimize the waste in open source. --- ## 📖 Main Content: Riggins discusses the dark side of open source: inefficiency and “waste.” Despite the sector’s reputation for democratizing software and empowering contributors, too many projects overlap, fragment, or die on the vine. The author highlights the following themes: - **Duplication of Effort**: Multiple projects attempt to solve the same problem, diluting community effort and attention. - **Abandonware**: Projects become unsupported, leaving users with insecure or broken dependencies. - **Burnout**: Overreliance on volunteer maintainers leads to exhaustion, especially when projects lack clear governance or support. - **Governance Gaps**: The decentralized, permissionless culture can make it hard to steer or sunset projects productively. - **Wasted Resources**: Company resources, contributor time, and environmental costs mount when projects are forked or neglected rather than consolidated. The article proposes actionable solutions: - **Better Coordination**: Improve communication and collaboration between projects. - **Sustainable Funding**: Move beyond “goodwill” to fund open source as infrastructure. - **Clearer Governance**: Create transparent pathways for project lifecycle management, including sunsetting. - **User Responsibility**: Users and organizations should audit and support the projects they depend on, not just take for granted that open source is “free.” Riggins also shares examples from recent high-profile open-source failures, illustrating the impact of neglect and redundancy. ### 🗒️ Notes - *Open Source Myths*: Open source is often idealized as free, democratic, and always innovative. The reality can be messier. - Real costs: volunteer burnout, wasted effort, security risks from neglected code. - *Duplication*: - Many projects solve the same problem in parallel (e.g., multiple JavaScript frameworks), dividing the community. - Forking is easy but coordination is hard. - *Abandonware*: - Projects lacking maintenance create cascading issues for dependent applications. - Security and compatibility risks increase as projects rot. - *Burnout & Community Health*: - Emotional and physical exhaustion is common among core maintainers. - Lack of sustainable funding or governance fuels attrition. - *Governance Challenges*: - Few open-source projects have clear, enforceable lifecycle policies. - Decision-making is often informal or left to one or two individuals. - *Waste of Resources*: - Time, money, and even carbon emissions rise with every abandoned repo or duplicated library. - *Suggested Solutions*: - Encourage collaboration over competition. - Foster funding models—grants, sponsorships, collective ownership. - Develop sunset policies to gracefully retire projects. - Urge organizations to contribute back, not just consume. --- ## 📖 References: - Riggins, Jennifer. [The Hidden Cost of Open Source Waste](https://thenewstack.io/the-hidden-cost-of-open-source-waste/). The New Stack, 2024. - Related: Nadia Eghbal, "Working in Public"; OSI; SustainOSS. --- ## 🗣️ Paraphrase:  1. **Original**: “Without coordination, open source often leads to hundreds of projects with overlapping aims and features, resulting in a landscape cluttered with redundant, partially maintained codebases.” **Paraphrased**: A lack of organized collaboration in open source frequently produces countless projects with similar goals, filling the ecosystem with repeated, inconsistently maintained code. 2. **Original**: "Relying solely on volunteer labor, without sustainable funding or support, can cause even the most passionate maintainers to burn out, leading to project abandonment and frustrated users." **Paraphrased**: When open-source projects depend exclusively on volunteers and lack long-term funding, even dedicated maintainers can become overwhelmed and step away, leaving users in a difficult position. --- ## 📰 Newsletter: 🚀 **Open Source: Boon or Boondoggle?** This week, we tackle the real price tag of open-source innovation. In her must-read piece, Jennifer Riggins dissects the underbelly of our beloved open-source world, exposing the hidden costs—duplication, burnout, and mountains of abandonware. Are we building the next great thing, or just reinventing the wheel over and over? Learn how sustainable funding, better governance, and sunset policies can future-proof your projects (and your sanity). Plus: WordPress plugin roundups, fresh dev tutorials, and a big shoutout to community teams working hard to keep our code alive and well. 👉 [Read the full article](https://thenewstack.io/the-hidden-cost-of-open-source-waste/) | #OpenSource #Sustainability --- ## ✅ Action Items: - **Advocacy**: Promote awareness of open-source “waste” in talks and onboarding guides, emphasizing sustainability over novelty. - **Education**: Integrate modules on project lifecycle management and sunset policies into contributor training. - **Contributor Engagement**: Recognize burnout and promote healthy boundaries; create support channels for maintainers. - **OSPO Vision**: Champion coordinated funding efforts and transparent governance as core to open-source strategy. - **Transparency & Inclusivity**: Ensure that project documentation and decision-making are open, accessible, and inclusive. - **Alignment**: This article aligns with your focus by pushing for responsible, sustainable growth and contributor wellbeing—a must for OSPO leadership and WordPress ecosystem health. --- ## 🧪 Hypotheses: - H1: Open-source projects with formal governance and sunset policies experience less resource waste and lower maintainer burnout. - H2: Communities that pool resources for infrastructure projects reduce duplication and increase code quality. - H3: Training contributors in sustainability and project management leads to fewer abandoned projects. ### 📊 Methodology: - **Comparative Studies**: Analyze open-source projects with and without formal sunset policies for rates of duplication and abandonment. - **Surveys/Interviews**: Collect data from maintainers on burnout, governance, and project lifecycle experience. - **Case Analysis**: Track organizational participation in collective funding models and measure long-term sustainability outcomes. ### ❓ Questions: - How can the WordPress ecosystem balance innovation with sustainability? - What would an ideal project lifecycle and sunset policy look like for WordPress plugins? - I - Summary: Reducing inefficiencies saves time and resources and reinforces trust in the software supply chain. - URL: https://search.app/Ek1JYafowvuN6uAs5  Photo by [Alfonso Navarro](https://unsplash.com/@poncho_nj?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/assorted-box-lot-on-brown-wooden-pallets-qph7tJfcDys?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash). Open source has reshaped software development, driving innovation, enabling collaboration, and allowing teams to build faster than ever before. Yet, alongside these benefits lies an often overlooked challenge: Inefficiency in managing its components. Automated dependency management — if the [automation is reliable — offers a way](https://thenewstack.io/three-ways-automation-can-improve-workplace-culture/) to address these challenges by streamlining processes, reducing manual effort, and empowering teams to focus on innovation instead of repetitive software composition analysis (SCA) tasks. The scope of the problem is significant. According to Sonatype’s [2024 State of the Software Supply Chain Report](https://www.sonatype.com/state-of-the-software-supply-chain/introduction), the average application includes 150 dependencies, 90% of which are transitive — dependencies indirectly pulled in through other libraries. These transitive dependencies account for 96% of known vulnerabilities, making them both critical to address and hard to track. Despite their best intentions, many development teams lack the strategies or tools to navigate these challenges effectively. Beyond technical complexities, there’s a strategic question: how can organizations balance the demand for speed with the [need for robust security](https://thenewstack.io/security-needs-create-more-work-for-open-source-maintainers/)? With shorter [development timelines and increasingly sophisticated security](https://thenewstack.io/building-and-securing-containers-with-slim-ai/) threats, this balancing act defines the current software supply chain management landscape. The answer that tips the scale lies in not choosing one over the other but addressing inefficiencies. #### **The True Impact of Inefficiency** Open source inefficiencies impact organizations in ways that go well beyond technical concerns. First, they drain productivity. Developers spend as much as [35% of their time](https://thenewstack.io/how-much-time-do-developers-spend-actually-writing-code/) untangling dependency issues or managing vulnerabilities — time that could be far better spent building new products, paying down technical debt, or introducing automation to drive cost efficiencies. A welcome outcome of efficient supply chain management is stronger security. Organizations naturally reduce their exposure to risks like supply chain attacks by addressing dependency inefficiencies. While these attacks surged by 156% in 2024, proactive management ensures vulnerabilities are mitigated early, turning potential risks into opportunities to build trust and resilience. Perhaps the most intangible but equally damaging consequence is the erosion of trust. When software fails to meet expectations for security and resilience, it impacts users and the broader perception of a company’s reliability. Businesses rely on [secure supply chains](https://thenewstack.io/flaw-in-r-creates-supply-chain-security-risks/) to deliver on their promises, and inefficiencies in these systems can quickly undermine even the strongest reputations. Once trust is lost, it’s nearly impossible to win back. #### **Understanding the Root Cause** At the heart of these inefficiencies is a need for greater visibility. Direct dependencies are relatively easy to track, but transitive ones buried deep within the [software stack are harder to manage](https://thenewstack.io/managing-software-development-team-dynamics-from-within/). These unseen elements can significantly increase an organization’s attack surface, yet they often go unnoticed until it’s too late. TRENDING STORIES Outdated dependencies compound the challenge. According to the report, 80% of application dependencies remain un-upgraded for over a year. While not all of these components introduce critical vulnerabilities, failing to address them increases the risk of undetected security gaps and adds unnecessary complexity to the software supply chain. This lack of timely updates leaves development teams with [mounting technical debt](https://thenewstack.io/technical-debt-continues-to-mount-heres-how-to-solve-it/) and a higher likelihood of encountering issues that could have been avoided. The rapid pace of software evolution adds another layer of difficulty. Dependencies can become outdated in weeks, creating a moving target that’s hard to manage without automation and actionable insights. Teams often play catch-up, deepening inefficiencies and increasing the time spent on reactive maintenance. Automation helps bridge this gap by scanning for risks and prioritizing high-impact fixes, ensuring teams focus on the areas that matter most. Advanced tools that provide visibility and automation can mitigate these challenges. By mapping the entire dependency tree and highlighting outdated components, they provide the insights teams need to take timely, informed action, significantly improving the efficiency of vulnerability remediation efforts. #### **Practical Steps to Address Open Source Waste** Optimizing the software supply chain isn’t just about solving inefficiencies — it’s about creating a better developer experience. Automation is critical here, reducing manual effort and enabling developers to focus on creative, high-value work rather than repetitive dependency management tasks. Integrating [security and dependency management early in the development](https://thenewstack.io/3-api-vulnerabilities-developers-accidentally-create/) lifecycle, automated tools help make development faster, more enjoyable, and more rewarding. Equally important is the adoption of context-aware tools that combine automation with prioritization. Not all vulnerabilities are created equal, and automated tools that assess risks based on exploitability, business impact, and application exposure allow teams to allocate resources effectively. This targeted approach ensures critical issues are addressed quickly, while less urgent concerns don’t distract from more pressing tasks. Finally, improving visibility across the entire dependency tree, including transitive dependencies, is essential. Automated solutions provide actionable insights into how dependencies interact and where risks lie, enabling teams to make informed decisions about updates, replacements, or removals. This insight reduces unnecessary complexity and builds a more dependable and resilient software supply chain. These measures aren’t about doing more work but working smarter. Organizations can reclaim lost productivity by adopting strategic, data-driven practices and leveraging automation at every stage while significantly reducing costs. Automated tools and more intelligent workflows avoid the expense of rework and minimize time spent resolving vulnerabilities, enabling teams to focus resources on delivering innovative features. #### **Unlocking the Potential of Open Source** While managing open source presents challenges, the opportunities far outweigh the risks if inefficiencies are effectively addressed. Automation is a key enabler here, helping organizations streamline dependency management and transform open source waste into a source of strength. Reducing inefficiencies saves time and resources and reinforces trust in the software supply chain. Automated tools empower developers to dedicate their efforts to building innovative features while customers and partners benefit from more secure, dependable products. By integrating automation into every development lifecycle stage, teams can proactively manage risks while accelerating delivery timelines. Open source has become a cornerstone of modern software development. By mitigating hidden costs and leveraging automation to enhance processes, organizations can ensure that it remains a sustainable and secure foundation for innovation that will drive progress for years., The Hidden Cost of Open Source Waste, Mitchell Johnson, 01jj252tm0b2h7h0qy8p4n2w9c.