Open Source Is Booming Right Now, and That's Not Only Good News

With a huge chunk of the world’s developers now working from home, something predictable but still striking is happening: open-source activity is spiking. Several communities are reporting jumps in pull requests and a wave of new contributors showing up in issue trackers who weren’t there a couple months ago. Stuck at home, with commutes gone and side projects suddenly more appealing than doomscrolling, a lot of people are pointing their spare hours at the software they already use.

On its face this is exactly the kind of silver lining you’d hope for. Open source runs on discretionary time, and right now a lot of people have more of it than usual. New contributors are a project’s lifeblood — today’s first-time typo fix is sometimes tomorrow’s long-term maintainer. More eyes on the code, more edge cases getting tested, more translations, more documentation fixes. All good.

But the maintainers actually running these projects are sounding a quieter, more worried note: the incoming volume of pull requests and issues is growing faster than anyone’s capacity to review it. That’s a real problem, because open-source maintenance was already a bottleneck before any of this. A shockingly large share of widely-used software is kept alive by a small number of people, often unpaid, often doing it in whatever hours they can spare around a day job. Now those same people are also dealing with the same disrupted routines, childcare, anxiety, and Zoom fatigue as everyone else — while their inbox fills up faster than ever.

Review capacity doesn’t scale like contribution does

Writing a pull request is, in a lot of cases, the easy part. Reviewing one properly — checking it against the project’s design goals, testing it, making sure it doesn’t quietly break something else, writing feedback, going back and forth with the contributor — takes real, focused attention. That doesn’t parallelize well. You can’t just throw more contributors at a project and expect the queue to clear itself; if anything, more incoming PRs without more reviewers just means a longer backlog and slower response times, which is exactly the kind of thing that burns out a maintainer who already feels like they’re falling behind.

I don’t think there’s a tidy fix here. Some projects will handle the surge by recruiting a few of the new contributors into co-maintainer roles, which is honestly the healthiest outcome if it happens. Others will just grind through a longer backlog and hope people are patient. A few maintainers, understandably, might step back or slow down entirely, which would be a rough loss right when demand for stable software is unusually high.

If you’re one of the people newly excited about contributing to a project right now — and it’s a genuinely great time to start — it’s worth remembering the maintainer on the other end might be more stretched than usual. Small, well-scoped PRs, patience on review turnaround, and a willingness to help triage issues or review other people’s PRs (not just submit your own) go a long way. The surge is a gift. Whether it turns into sustainable long-term help or just a bigger pile of unreviewed work is still an open question.