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Sustain brings together practitioners, sustainers, funders, researchers and maintainers of the open source ecosystem. We have conversations about the health and sustainability of the open source community. We learn about the ins and outs of what ‘open source’ entails in the real world. Open source means so much more than a license; we're interested in talking about how to make sure that the culture of open source continues, grows, and ultimately, sustains itself. #mcembedsignup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; width:100%;} /* Add your own Mailchimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We r...
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Sustain shows how funding, governance, education, and community work determine the durability of open-source projects.
Sustain follows the work required to keep open source useful after the code has shipped. Richard Littauer conducts guest interviews that treat maintenance as a financial, organizational, and educational problem.
A robot needs sensors; shared software needs money. Richard Littauer makes you care about both.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
MaveDB's future depends on making complex experimental data useful beyond the code itself.
Research infrastructure does not always look dramatic until a field has to make sense of data produced in many different ways. Sustain's conversation with Alan Rubin, a computational biologist in Melbourne working on the open-source MaveDB project, brings that work into view.
A lively Sustain discussion turns scientific software dependencies into a story about cycles, tooling, and Katz centrality.
This Sustain episode treats scientific software as research infrastructure, following the open-source dependencies that hold projects together and the value of mapping those links.
A clear overview of IOI's report on funding, governance, adoption, and policy in open infrastructure.
Sustain frames open infrastructure as a matter of long-term stewardship, with Richard Littauer talking to Emi Tsang, engagement lead at Invest in Open Infrastructure, about the State of Open Infrastructure 2024 report.
A grounded look at open-source code becoming cooperative labor, shared ownership, and an unresolved membership question.
Sustain keeps open-source sustainability close to the work itself: code, money, and ownership all have to function together once a project lives on the Internet.
A grounded conversation on using robotics as a wider doorway into STEM.
Sustained's conversation with Carlotta Berry works best as a practical look at how robotics can open wider routes into STEM. Berry, a professor and Lawrence Giacoletto endowed chair in electrical and computer engineering, lays out robotics as a meeting point for mechanical…
A relaxed look at how technical writing holds up as software moves on.
Open source sustainability comes through here as a plain, useful question: how do the notes, docs, and small bits of technical knowledge keep working as the tools around them change?
Julia Evans discusses her journey creating technical zines through Wizard Zines, focusing on tools like Git and strace to make complex topics accessible.
This episode introduces a crossover with the new Open Source for Climate podcast, shifting focus from general open source sustainability to its application in tackling the climate crisis, featuring Max Jones from CarbonPlan discussing their open source work.
Host Richard Littauer interviews Deb Goodkin, executive director of the FreeBSD Foundation, about the history and sustainability of FreeBSD, an operating system derived from Unix, and its role in the open source ecosystem.
["Sustain episode 287 centers on Alan Rubin, a computational biologist in Melbourne, and Richard Littauer's interview about MaveDB, an open-source research database for protein-variant data.", "Rubin says MaveDB began because early experimental papers buried thousands of variant scores in supplemental tables with incompatible formats and poor discoverability.", "He describes the lab workflow as synthesized DNA libraries, pooled cellular assays, and high-throughput sequencing, then calls the approach \u201cfuzz testing in the genome.\u201d", "The conversation then turns to funding gaps for infrastructure, the clinic-facing MADE-MD interface, and Rubin's work with the Atlas of Variant Effects Alliance and GA4GH standards."]
Sustain Episode 236 covers the preprint "Biomedical Open Source Software, Crucial Packages and Hidden Heroes," discussed by host Richard Letour with Ava Maxfield-Brown and Boris Weizmann.
Emi Tsang says Invest in Open Infrastructure's first flagship report analyzes 415 million US dollars of grant funding, 57 open infrastructure services, and policy trends across research infrastructure.
Sustain speaks with Simon Vansintjan about Mirlo, an open-source music platform he describes as Bandcamp plus Patreon.
Dr.
The hosts interview Susan Kennedy, program manager for the Open Technology Fund, about sustaining open source and promoting internet freedom.
Host Richard Lutauer interviews Aaron Wolfe about open source sustainability and the founding of Snowdrift.coop.
Interview with Ruth Cheesley about maintaining the open source marketing automation platform Mautic and the challenges of open source sustainability.
Discussion about open source sustainability with Martin Woodward, VP of Developer Relations at GitHub.
Discussion about open source maintenance, focusing on Rust ecosystem challenges like semantic versioning.
Gitcoin connects open-source coders and funders through Ethereum bounties, with more than $2 million moving through its network in 18 months.
Sustain host Eric Berry interviews Mehdi Medjaoui about trademark contracts and economic sustainability for open-source maintainers.