Open Source Must Be Fun (Or It Will Die) | Mike McQuaid

Mike McQuaid

CTPO and Homebrew Project Leader

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Open Source Must Be Fun (Or It Will Die)

26 July 2026

I was on a call with a bunch of people involved in other prominent open source projects a few weeks ago.<br>The organiser jokingly asked us to raise our hands if the previous six months had been better than what came before.<br>I raised my hand.<br>No one else did.<br>Why?<br>I’ve maintained Homebrew, the package manager for everywhere, for nearly 17 years.<br>I’ve worked on it the vast majority of weeks in that time and I’ve never burned out.<br>I’m having more fun than ever.

The current narrative around open source is depressing.<br>Apparently it’s “dying”.

AI drive-by issues, pull requests and security reports are overwhelming maintainers.<br>Rising security expectations (thanks Mythos) require maintainers to do even more work.<br>Open source funding is hard to secure and insufficient.

Some of this is happening, but I’m sure as hell not seeing it in Homebrew.<br>Another Homebrew maintainer told me:

I’m having more fun than ever before.

💎 The Scarcest Resource

As I’ve written before, the scarcest resource in open source is not money but the motivation of the maintainers.<br>Sending Homebrew $1000 today doesn’t magically create any more maintainer time (but please donate if you can afford it to fund Homebrew’s infrastructure, stipends, grants and meetups).<br>We all have jobs that aren’t maintaining Homebrew.<br>We receive small amounts of money ($300/month) if we’re actively maintaining Homebrew.<br>This is not a “market hourly rate”.<br>Many children delivering newspapers get a higher hourly rate.

There is a threshold effect: funding only creates more time if it lets a maintainer reduce their paid hours or quit their job.<br>Work no maintainer wants to do is a good candidate for a paid contract.<br>If you can’t fund it: don’t do it.

Why do any of it then?<br>Fun.

Not everything is fun all of the time, but it needs to be “utilitarian net fun”: more fun than not, overall.<br>This is primarily about volunteer-run open source, but that’s most of it.<br>If you have a paid open source job and hate it: you should quit that too.

It’s a Sunday afternoon.<br>I took the kids most of yesterday so I have a bit of “me” time today.<br>I’ve spent a bunch of that time on Homebrew.<br>Not because I “had” to; nothing urgent is coming in.<br>Not because of the “supply chain”.<br>Not because of the money.<br>Because I wanted to.<br>Because it was fun.

🥳 Fun Is Social

My first real experience of OSS was with a successful, established project whose culture I could observe.<br>It was KDE, the community behind a desktop environment for Linux.<br>In 2009, I attended Akademy (the KDE contributor conference) and GUADEC (the GNOME contributor conference), which were co-located in the Canary Islands.

Firstly, this was weird because, if you read the discourse online, you were typically in the camp of “KDE SUCKS, GNOME ROCKS” or “GNOME SUCKS, KDE ROCKS”.<br>And yet: you had both groups working together.<br>Not just working together but eating, drinking, socialising and building new friendships.

Secondly, I could tell that, for many in the KDE camp, these were their people and this was the highlight of their year.<br>They came back re-energised and motivated to work on KDE.<br>Most people weren’t being paid to fix, maintain or write KDE’s code.<br>They didn’t seem to be doing it for their users either.<br>They did it because they were having fun, both individually writing the code and helping their friends build something they cared about.

For the last few years, Homebrew maintainers have met annually at the “Homebrew AGM” co-located with FOSDEM in Brussels.<br>We meet, eat, drink, socialise and make plans for Homebrew.<br>Afterwards, we come back re-energised.<br>Since we started doing this, I’ve also seen people doing more for other maintainers than directly for users.<br>Open source transcends national boundaries: most of us don’t care what country another maintainer is from or what nationality they are, only that we’re friends building something we find fun together.<br>These relationships matter because, without the maintainers, the project is dead.

🍺 Keeping Homebrew Fun

This is why I’ve always been keen for Homebrew to be a fun project.<br>Dealing with entitled behaviour is not fun.<br>Setting SLAs is not fun.<br>Maintaining indefinite backwards compatibility is not fun.

Homebrew has been successful because fun, automation, community and putting maintainers first have been priorities from early on.<br>Concretely, we automated review comments so robots are the pedants and humans can focus on empathy.<br>Our guardrails include CI, linting, typing and tests to catch routine mistakes before a maintainer has to point them out.<br>Feature flags and staged rollouts let us experiment without breaking things for everyone.<br>This means maintainers spend less time on repetitive corrections and more on work they find interesting.

AI is...