Free Software Isn't Gratis: why companies should treat Open Source as part of their Infrastructure
OPEN SOURCE
🌎 Mexico 2026
Maintaining an open source project is hard. It requires managing a group of people who are largely working for free to build something that other people profit from, usually distributed across the glo…
Maintaining an open source project is hard. It requires managing a group of people who are largely working for free to build something that other people profit from, usually distributed across the globe, with limited resources.
The whole time you’re doing this, you’re receiving demands from users and businesses alike for features or bug fixes on a timeline that works for them, not you and your (possibly very limited) group of contributors that you can’t exactly order around, since they aren’t being paid. It’s stressful, and it can be overwhelming. When one of these projects is the victim of an attack that takes advantage of the fact that there are only one or two maintainers, or eventually has to shut down due to rising technical debt and falling contributor numbers, the public blame falls on us, not on the businesses that didn’t offer contributors in time.
Sobre Christopher Tineo: I am an engineer passionate about the cloud-native ecosystem and dedicated to fostering knowledge sharing within open-source communities. Currently, I work as a Deployments Engineer in the defense industry. Outside of work, I enjoy staying active through workouts and dedicating my time to preparing talks for my local community in the Dominican Republic, aiming to inspire and empower others in the tech space.