11ty is joining Font Awesome

I think this is great for 11ty and the folks working on it, but also I think it is a sign. No judgement on them but, if 11ty, a beloved and widely used open source project that has been adopted by major companies, cannot run itself sustainably as an independent operation I don't think new FOSS stuff can be sustainably run as independent projects that are not side gigs to full time jobs by their admins.

I'm not sure if it was ever sustainable but I think things have been getting worse. It is harder to get donations, sponsorships, grants, etc... and at the same time, people who might normally put money towards these projects are getting pulled in a lot of directions, with less stable jobs and more expensive basic requirements for their lives than ever before. I really think that the open web has to consider broadly that we ask a lot of open source maintainers and there have been no truly successful models where they can be successfully independent other than WordPress and Linux and those are wild exceptions that have their own set of difficulties. Even the model where people would essentially be hired to contribute to open source projects on behalf of their company interests seem to be shifting as employment becomes tighter in tech and more precarious.

I think we are robbing ourselves of a lot, both tech and culture wise, by saying these major contributors to how the web works shouldn't be compensated like their work is work and shouldn't expect to make a living off it on their own. Something is broken and the fix is unclear to me.

(Additional context in these links)

We’ve had a lot of great discussions about best practices for sustainable open source with the Font Awesome folks in the past few months and they have a well established record of maintaining open source projects—as evidenced by the path already paved by Cory Laviska with Shoelace and Web Awesome (October 2022).

We’re excited that Eleventy is going to play a deeper role in the Awesome ecosystem and believe that this partnership will extend the life expectancy of the project well beyond our original ten-year goal!