Over the past several years, the InterSystems Developer Community has accumulated more than 1,000 open-source projects. Many of them serve as examples and learning materials — but a significant number have become useful tools, libraries, integrations, and real-world components used in production.
Some of these projects are mine, and like many community developers, I’ve seen the same recurring problem:
- It’s easy to create an open-source project.
- It’s hard to maintain, support, and develop it sustainably — especially without funding.
Writing code is one thing.
Supporting it for years, keeping up with new IRIS versions, building CI pipelines, writing documentation, fixing issues, reviewing PRs — all of this demands both time and motivation, and the biggest motivator is often financial support.
This is not a new challenge.
The global open-source world has faced this for decades and has developed various models to support OSS ecosystems.
I believe it’s time for the InterSystems community to start a discussion about adopting a similar model.
Week