I like maintainers. I’ve spent years reading their mailing lists, filing their bugs and depending on code they wrote at night for nothing, and I run a few small projects myself. So I’m the last person who wants to argue that the human at the centre of an open source project matters less than we say. My claim is narrower than that. It’s about what happens on the days that person isn’t there.

Two stories about compensating the people whose work underlies modern software and AI surfaced the same day, and they represent almost opposite mechanisms for solving the same problem. GitHub says individuals and organizations have invested more than $100 million in open source maintainers and projects through GitHub Sponsors since 2019, with $10 million of that total arriving in just the past five months. Separately, Sony Music has filed a second copyright suit against Udio, alleging the AI music company copied 30,117 recordings without permission to train its models.