OSS maintainers. The heroes of software development, champions of niche domains, simplifiers of complex code, protectors of the project roadmap, are flush with, just, so much cash.
Jax Hansen, the creator of the RegReplace Zero library, a Rust utility library for zero-allocation string replacement, had this to say about life as an OSS maintainer: "It's great, everyone should do it. My project got very popular and is used by every fortune 500 company. Now I just watch the money come in from sponsorships, and tips from lone developers. Since the library is mature now, the workload is lite. We push an update every couple of sprints. But so many people want to contribute to the project that I hardly do anything anymore. Just accept the PRs and go about my day. Every few months someone will open a GitHub Issue with a support question, but even then a community member answers before I have the chance to read it. Meta made an offer to buy the project, but I don't know if I want to do that. A couple million is nice, but the joy of running this project fills me with joy."
When asked if there's anything he wishes were different about being an OSS maintainer, he replied, "I wish people would just leave me alone when I'm in San Francisco. Everyone wants an autograph or a selfie. I'm just a normal guy who puts his pants on one leg at a time, like everyone else."