There is an alternative, which is that $BigCorp for whom a single SWE salary is a drop in the ocean offers to hire the maintainer as a FTE. If there’s only a fraction of an employee’s worth of work to do to maintain the package, they give the maintainer other responsibilities as well, helping build or maintain other software (or processes or teams or whatever).
There is an alternative, which is that $BigCorp for whom a single SWE salary is a drop in the ocean offers to hire the maintainer as a FTE. If there’s only a fraction of an employee’s worth of work to do to maintain the package, they give the maintainer other responsibilities as well, helping build or maintain other software (or processes or teams or whatever).