A FOSS Ecosystem Checklist for the Benefit of Maintainer Sustainability

Maintainers and authors are found everywhere throughout our dependency trees. This includes the authors of the tooling others use for maintaining, building, testing, writing and running the infrastructure they depend on. Even maintainers depend on other maintainers. Maintainers’ mental health and well-being is also a dependency. So is their outlook on the sustainability of their projects, both in personal, technical, systemic and economic respects. This means that personal, technical, systemic and economic well-being in the end are all actual and real dependencies for the businesses that rely on these people and their projects. What can an ecosystem provide to make the lives of these maintainers easier in this regard? …continued