On June 23-25, open source leaders and practitioners from around the world gathered for the Open Source Summit North America 2025 hosted by the Linux Foundation. The event served as a pulse check on the health of the OSS ecosystem, surfacing both urgent challenges and emerging opportunities in infrastructure, licensing, and governance.

Our Business Development Director, Mirza Baig, was on-site, engaging with maintainers, attending technical sessions, and bringing back insights from keynotes and hallway conversations. If one theme dominated this year’s summit, it was this: open source plays a critical role in global innovation, economic growth, and digital resilience.

What stood out most to me, though, were the people-focused challenges that come with that growth. Sustainability through people emerged as a key theme, highlighting maintainer burnout, the lack of leadership pipelines, and the risks of accidental stewardship in critical projects.

Mirza Baig

Here’s what we learned on the ground.

Rethinking Open Source Economics

The first day of the summit revolved around one question: What is the economic impact of open source software? Not only how much it saves us in development time, but how deeply it powers the digital economy. Frank Nagle, a Harvard Business School professor and newly appointed Advising Chief Economist for the Linux Foundation, offered an answer.

According to Nagle's 2024 research paper, "The Value of Open Source Software," if open source vanished tomorrow, companies around the globe would need to spend 3.5 times more to replace it. That adds up to a staggering $8.8 trillion in demand-side value. In other words, open source is a foundational layer of our economy.

Historically, estimates of open source value focused on the supply side — what it would cost to re-create the code. Nagle’s team puts that figure at $4.15 billion. But his study flips the script. It calculates how much companies would have to spend to build or buy alternatives if open source didn’t exist. That demand-side perspective paints a far more complete picture of our economic dependency on OSS.

• Ubiquity: 96% of commercial codebases include open source components.
• Concentrated Creation: Just 5% of open source developers generate 96% of that $8.8 trillion value.
• Productivity Gains: Companies that contribute to open source boost their productivity twice as much as those that only use it.

The very openness that makes OSS powerful also makes it vulnerable. If everyone benefits but no one takes responsibility, the system suffers. It’s time for corporations and policymakers to step up and invest in maintaining the digital public goods they depend on.

Janea Systems has been at the forefront of open source software development for years, helping companies like Microsoft build, scale, and maintain mission-critical OSS projects, including:

• PyTorch for Windows
• Node.js
• Microsoft PowerToys
• React Native for Windows

We help organizations contribute responsibly while capturing the full value of open collaboration:

• Our engineers fix critical bugs in performance-sensitive environments, such as resolving a CUDA matrix multiplication issue in PyTorch.
• We address integration challenges, such as MKL Sparse incompatibilities in PyTorch.
• Also, we help teams modernize their infrastructure, including porting software to ARM64 architecture.

Through contributions like these, Janea Systems continues to reinforce the OSS ecosystem with engineering expertise where it’s most needed.

Agent2Agent (A2A): A Universal Language for AI Collaboration

Later in the summit, attention turned to the next leap in AI: getting autonomous agents to collaborate. Mike Smith from Google introduced the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol — an open standard designed to help AI agents communicate and work together, securely and at scale.

Think of A2A as a universal language for AI. Whether built by Google, AWS, Microsoft, or anyone else, A2A gives agents a shared way to exchange information and collaborate on complex tasks. It’s the protocol equivalent of tearing down the walled gardens of AI.

And Google isn’t keeping it to itself. They donated the A2A protocol to the Linux Foundation, ensuring open, neutral governance with over 50 companies already on board, including major rivals of Google.

How A2A Works

• Agent Discovery: Every agent publishes an "Agent Card"— a JSON file that lists its skills and how to connect. This allows other agents to discover who can perform a specific task.
• Standardized Communication: A2A is built on proven web standards (HTTP, JSON-RPC, SSE), making it easy to slot into enterprise systems.
• Task Management: From simple sync requests to long-running, async tasks, the protocol defines a full task lifecycle.
• Secure by Design: Agents don’t have to expose internal logic, proprietary tools, or memory to collaborate. A2A keeps things private and enterprise-ready.

The vision is to lay the foundation for an interconnected world of intelligent systems. A future where AI agents function like a social network, each with its own strengths, discovering each other, and teaming up in real time. With A2A, we’re one step closer to that world.

Confronting the Maintainer Succession Crisis

One of the most urgent and human challenges surfaced at the summit was the crisis in open source project sustainability: maintainer burnout, and the lack of a viable pipeline for succession. This issue was the subject of a compelling presentation by Abigail Cabunoc Mayes, who leads open source maintainer programs at GitHub.

In her talk, "Who Will Maintain the Future?" Mayes drew on her experience founding the Mozilla Open Leaders program, which mentored over 600 projects in building sustainable and community-driven practices. Today’s open source is maintained by a shrinking group of overburdened contributors, many of whom are quietly aging out or burning out.

Nearly 60% of open source maintainers have either left or considered leaving a project. The reasons aren’t about architecture or frameworks — they’re personal: competing life demands (54%), loss of interest (51%), and burnout (44%) top the list. More than half say their work is undercompensated, and nearly the same number say it’s a major source of personal stress. For the 44% maintaining projects solo, the pressure can be intense and isolating.

Author Nadia Eghbal famously described this dynamic as “free as in puppy.” A developer launches a project out of passion, but as it gains traction, maintaining it becomes an unending chore — similar to raising a large, unruly dog. The initial spark is replaced by long-term responsibility and invisible labor.

We saw the consequences play out dramatically in the 2024 XZ Utils backdoor incident. A seemingly helpful contributor exploited a solo maintainer’s isolation, eventually inserting a malicious backdoor into widely-used software. The fallout? A 66% drop in maintainer trust toward new contributors, and a deepening of the very isolation that fuels burnout.

When Linus Torvalds himself flags the aging of Linux kernel maintainers, it’s a sign that the issue cuts across all layers of the OSS stack. Zombie dependencies, loss of institutional memory, and rising security risks are already here. Outdated code becomes a liability, exposing organizations to bugs, breakage, and breaches.

For years, the technology industry has discussed the "bus factor" — the risk of a project collapsing if a key developer is hit by a bus — as a hypothetical concern. CHAOSS re-frames this as the "Contributor Absence Factor" to make it more measurable.

The risk is not if another XZ-like event will happen, but when, and in which of the thousands of under-maintained packages it will occur. This transforms the problem from a community health issue into a critical portfolio risk management issue for every Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Security Officer.

Implementing Open Source Succession Planning

The open source ecosystem can no longer afford to rely on the spontaneous emergence of "hero" maintainers to sustain its most critical projects. The reality is sobering: research shows that 85% of the most popular GitHub projects rely on a single developer for the majority of commit-related discussions. That’s a bottleneck waiting to fail.

It’s time for organizations to move from an ad-hoc culture of individual heroics to one of deliberate resilience. Structured succession planning — a common practice in enterprise settings — must be translated to the open source context. This means identifying critical roles early, assessing contributor capacity, and building a pipeline of talent to step in as stewards when needed.

An open source succession plan starts with more than just naming a backup maintainer. It means mapping out all essential project functions, including code maintenance, community engagement, documentation, security, and identifying contributors who can grow into those roles. Programs like Mozilla Open Leaders offer a blueprint: guided mentorship, clear advancement paths, and formal knowledge transfer all help transform succession from a crisis response into a healthy, proactive process.

Ultimately, the goal is to shift the narrative from burnout and bottlenecks to continuity and collaboration. That doesn’t just protect codebases, but future-proofs the ecosystem.

This is where Janea Systems' engineering expertise becomes a strategic advantage. Our teams don’t just write code, they deliver solutions to some of the toughest technical challenges in the industry. Organizations that depend on open source can no longer afford to simply consume it. They need to actively invest in keeping it healthy and sustainable.

Partnering with Janea Systems means gaining more than software development capacity. It means enlisting a team committed to the resilience and longevity of the digital infrastructure we all depend on.

If your company depends on open source, it’s time to invest in its future.

Get in touch with our experts to explore how your company can strengthen its open source strategy and safeguard its digital infrastructure.