Will the solo open source developer survive the pandemic?

Open source has been booming for decades, but it tends to do particularly well in times of financial distress. Like now. As Drupal founder Dries Buytaert  has suggested , “Open source communities have the power to sustain themselves during an economic downturn, and even to grow.” I worked for an open source company through the last recession, and definitely saw this.
But that corporate perspective may overlook — as Donald Fischer, CEO and co-founder of Tidelift, suggests — the “independent open source maintainers,” meaning the developers who write and maintain the open source code that many companies use to build their applications. I wrote recently  about how projects with millions or even billions of users — like Drupal or curl — are often maintained by developers in it for the fun. What happens when financial or emotional survival trumps fun?
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