Hi

As we all know the XZ-Backdoor showed how open source can help to find out how and when things happened. You can look back into the source code, commits and comments to see what happened. Many started to talk about what it means regarding open source, and also showed that security is a very important part of computers and software.

But the XZ-Incident showed again one of the biggest problems of FOSS (and OSS), the lack of support the maintainers and contributors get. The maintainer of XZ (before he got replaced by Jia Tan via a social engineer attack), talked about mental issues and overall many things to look after. He was the only maintainer for a library that is used in many big Linux distributions but no one thought maybe to help him or support him.

We all use FOSS projects either knowingly or unknowingly (the XKDC comic comes to mind with the Nebraska maintainer project) and we all love and fight for open and free (libre) software. Simply using and pushing it is not enough we need to support the people that code, test and maintain the projects, libraries, programs that we use. If we don’t, it will crash down on us sometime in the future.

When a friend does something for you, you say thank you and maybe buy him/her a beer. Why not do that too for a converter you used or some cool little terminal addition you found and now can’t live without it?

As an experiment, make a list of all FOSS/OSS things you use in your daily life that you know of, and then look them up to see if they need funding or in general how they stand. Maybe you can donate to a few of them.

Make FOSS not only a philosophy but also a community that looks after each other.