The Open Source Maintenance Fee with Rob Mensching
Open Source Maintainers are burning out or going commercial - how do we solve this? Carl and Richard chat with Rob Mensching about his work to create the open source maintenance fee through GitHub. Rob talks about the common problem of single maintainers getting buried under issues and demands of consumers for a project. Recognizing that most people cannot contribute to the project, a maintenance fee helps support the maintainer in a low friction way for everyone involved. Check out the links to get started!
Guests:
Rob Mensching
Rob Mensching is the CEO and co-founder of FireGiant, a company that provides commercial support and tools for the WiX Toolset. He's also the creator and maintainer of WiX, the most powerful set of tools for building Windows installation packages. WiX holds the unique distinction of being the first Open Source project released by Microsoft, and Rob has been deeply involved in open source for over 25 years. He's passionate about making Open Source sustainable, and his latest proposal, the Open Source Maintenance Fee, is all about creating a better path forward for projects and their maintainers.
Links:
- POEditor https://github.com/marketplace/poeditor
- Rob Mensching Page https://robmensching.com/
- WiX Toolset https://www.firegiant.com/wixtoolset/
- Open Source Maintenance Fee https://opensourcemaintenancefee.org/
- Open Source Maintenance Fee Blog Post https://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2025/02/26/introducing-the-open-source-maintenance-fee/
- xkcd Dependency https://xkcd.com/2347/
- XZ Utils Backdoor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor
- Maintenance Fee for WiX Toolset https://github.com/sponsors/wixtoolset
- SPDX Tools https://spdx.dev/use/spdx-tools/