Episode 142: Nicholas Zakas on Sponsoring Dependencies, All The Way Down

Guest Nicholas Zakas Panelists Richard Littauer | Justin Dorfman Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Our guest today is a returning guest that we’ve had on before. We are excited to have joining us, Nicholas Zakas, who’s one of the maintainers on ESLint, which is a tool that helps you find and fix problems in your JavaScript code. Today, we’ll learn all about ESLint, the maintainers, contributors, and how they get paid. Also, we’ll find out the success behind ESLint, and a post about sponsoring dependencies that Nicholas wrote on his blog. Go ahead and download this episode now to learn more! [00:02:23] Nicholas tells us all about ESLint, their maintainers that work on the project, and how many people have contributed to the project on GitHub. [00:07:29] Nicholas tells us how maintainers get paid as part of his governance strategy. [00:10:04] Justin asked about the fact that ESLint not only pays contributors, but also pays downstream dependencies. [00:12:04] Richard wonders where all the money comes from that gave ESLint this huge surplus, and Nicholas explains how they raised so much and what it is about ESLint that makes that possible. [00:16:10] We hear some reflections from Richard as he congratulates Nicholas and makes some important points about the success of ESLint. [00:20:19] Nicholas fills us in on the OpenJS Foundation Project. [00:23:57] Richard talks about a blog post Nicholas wrote on his blog about sponsoring dependencies, and Nicholas explains the difference between large charismatic projects and smaller projects and how he sees the role of large projects in funding the smaller ones. [00:31:41] We hear what ESLint did with sponsoring dependencies, and Nicholas tells us about some projects that they wanted to support financially, but turned them down. [00:38:06] Find out where you can follow Nicholas and ESLint online. Quotes [00:07:43] “Everybody on the team, the committers, reviewers, technical steering committee,