2026-06-08 –, Kesselhaus
Over 25 years, open source has become vital digital infrastructure. However, its future relies on human resilience, not just code. To combat burnout, funding gaps, and new regulations, we must move beyond old methods and address sustainability through global policy, security, and community health.
Quietly over the course of 25 years, open source software evolved from a domain perceived as that of only hobbyists into the invaluable backbone of modern digital infrastructure. Sustaining that success for the future will require more than code. It requires resilience: a trait not of technology. but of people. Of community. With increasing regulation around the world, evolving cybersecurity requirements, burnt out contributors, and stagnant corporate participation and funding, how do we ensure the ecosystem's continued success? The things that have worked for the first decades will not be the things that keep us going. Let's look together at sustainability not only as a funding problem, but also from the perspectives of global policy changes, security, and other intertwined issues that face open source in the coming years.
Ruth Suehle is Director of Open Source at SAS, where she is building a nearly 50-year-old analytics, data management, and AI software company’s first open source program office. She is also president of the Apache Software Foundation and a member of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) board of directors. Ruth has helped build open source communities for nearly two decades, much of which she spent in the OSPO at Red Hat. Co-author of Raspberry Pi Hacks (O’Reilly, December 2013) and former editor of Red Hat Magazine and opensource.com, she is a frequent writer, currently as core contributor at GeekMom.com(previously of WIRED), where she covers the adventures of motherhood and fandom.