<strong>In 2023, Sonatype reported an 18% decline in actively maintained open-source projects.</strong> Development managers must prioritize supply-chain...
Open-Source Maintenance Decline 2023: What Development Managers Must Do
In 2023, Sonatype reported an 18% decline in actively maintained open-source projects. Development managers must prioritize supply-chain visibility, platform choices, dependency hygiene, and vendor risk. Focus on observability, SBOMs, CI/CD policy, and scalable toolchains to cut technical debt and reduce security exposure.
- Sonatype found an 18% drop in actively maintained OSS in 2023.
- Development managers must think beyond code: supply chain, SBOMs, SCA, and CI/CD.
- Choose platforms that support artifact repositories, dependency graphs, and automated alerts.
- Prioritize policies that protect teams: dependency pinning, automated security scans, and maintainer engagement.
- Avoid common mistakes: blind trust in transitive dependencies, one-off fixes, and ignoring community health.
What is Open-Source Maintenance Decline 2023?
The short answer. Sonatype’s 2023 State of the Software Supply Chain report showed an 18% decline in the number of open-source projects that are actively maintained. That means fewer maintainers, slower patches, and longer windows for CVEs to be exploited. For a development manager, that is not an abstract stat. It is a mandate.
I am Ermenildo Valdez Castro, Jr. — Ernie Castro to friends. I have led teams at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Zulily. I am also Filipino living in Seattle. I have stared at flaky builds at 2 a.m. I have pushed fixes that touched thousands of services. The decline Sonatype reported is the kind of thing I learned to answer fast. The work is practical. It demands tools, policy, and human judgment.
Core Benefits and Importance
Why should you act now? Here are the key benefits when you treat the decline as a management problem, not only an engineering one.
- Increase reliability. When you track dependency health, builds stop breaking.
- Reduce security risk. SBOMs, SCA, and automated alerts shorten the time from CVE disclosure to patch.
- Save developer time. Fewer fires. More predictable roadmaps.
- Improve hiring and retention. Engineers stop doing endless dependency surgery.
Personal anecdote: At Amazon, a minor transitive change in a popular library broke a checkout flow in three services. The maintainer had gone quiet. We had no SBOM and no clear ownership of the affected transitive dependency. I spent two long days with a whiteboard, a script, and three engineers. We pinned versions, added integration tests, and subscribed to the library’s security feed. The fix worked. But it cost time and trust. I tell that story to remind managers: preparation pays.
Step-by-step Implementation Guide
Below is a concrete plan you can implement. Follow the steps. Iterate. Make it part of your sprint hygiene.
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Inventory and Map
- Start with an SBOM for each service. Know what you depend on, and how deep the dependency graph goes.
- Use the artifact repository metadata from Maven Central, npm, PyPI to map transitive dependencies.
- Tip from my days at Google: a nightly job that exports dependency graphs to a dashboard saved us hours each week.
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Categorize Risk
- Label packages as critical, important, or low-risk based on runtime exposure and business impact.
- Consider maintainership health: release cadence, open issues, recent commits, and number of maintainers.
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Choose Tools That Scale
- Use SCA (Software Composition Analysis) integrated into CI/CD. Let scans run on PRs and in nightly pipelines.
- Configure your CI to fail builds on critical vulnerabilities or high-severity transitive changes.
- Evaluate platforms that support SBOM generation and artifact tracing.
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Enforce Dependency Policy
- Pin versions where needed. Use lockfiles and reproducible builds.
- Approve exceptions through a lightweight review process.
- Create a team-level policy for when to fork, patch upstream, or replace a component.
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Monitor and Alert
- Subscribe to CVE feeds and vendor advisories for libraries you use. (See Snyk's analysis for trends.)
- Track maintainership signals: last commit date, PR velocity, and issue backlog.
- Add dashboards for dependency churn and security events.
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Engage with Maintainership
- If a library is critical and the maintainer is gone, consider sustained funding, hiring maintainers, or sponsoring fixes.
- Fork only when necessary. Prefer contributing patches upstream first.
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Process and Training
- Train teams on SBOMs and how to interpret SCA output.
- Run drills: simulate a broken dependency and measure time-to-mitigate.
- Make dependency health a metric in your team’s OKRs.
My experience: At Zulily, we sponsored a maintainer of a critical library. The effort cost less than losing two weeks of engineering work. The patch rate improved. Relations with the community also improved. Small investments can yield big returns.
Comparison Table
Markdown table (also shown in HTML below):
| Topic | Ad-hoc Maintenance | Proactive Supply-Chain Management |
|---|---:|---|
| Visibility | Low — manual checks | High — SBOMs, automated scans |
| CI/CD impact | Surprises in production | Fails fast in CI with policies |
| Security response | Slow, reactive | Fast — SCA alerts and triage |
| Maintainer risk | Ignored until failure | Monitored and mitigated |
| Cost | Hidden and high | Predictable and optimized |
| Topic |
Ad-hoc Maintenance |
Proactive Supply-Chain Management |
| Visibility |
Low — manual checks |
High — SBOMs, automated scans |
| CI/CD impact |
Surprises in production |
Fails fast in CI with policies |
| Security response |
Slow, reactive |
Fast — SCA alerts and triage |
| Maintainer risk |
Ignored until failure |
Monitored and mitigated |
| Cost |
Hidden and high |
Predictable and optimized |
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Blind trust in third-party metrics. A library with many stars can still be unmaintained.
- Only scanning for CVEs. You also need to monitor maintainership and release cadence.
- Forking too quickly. Forks add maintenance burden to your team.
- Treating SBOMs as a one-time deliverable. They must be live and updated with each build.
- Centralizing all decisions in a single gatekeeper. Empower teams with clear policy and tooling.
I once led a team that forked a small library to fix a bug. We did it in a weekend. We painted ourselves as heroes. Two weeks later, the upstream maintainer merged our patch and released a new version. We had to reconcile our fork, migrate, and remove custom changes. The fork cost us months. The right move would have been to push the patch upstream and use temporary overrides in CI.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What does the 18% decline mean for our release cadence?
A: Expect more friction. Some dependencies will have slower patch cadence. Build longer lead time into risky releases and enforce stronger CI policies.
Q: Should we stop using community libraries?
A: No. But you should be selective. Prioritize libraries with good maintainer health, reproducible builds, and active release cadence. Use SCA to manage risk. See analysis from Snyk and the GitHub Octoverse for broader trends.
Q: When should we fork a project?
A: Fork as a last resort. Prefer a patch-and-contribute approach. Fork if the library is critical, unmaintained, and the risk to your product is high.
Q: Which metrics should development managers track?
A: SBOM coverage, time-to-patch for critical CVEs, dependency churn, maintainership health (last commit, commit frequency), number of transitive dependencies, and mean time to repair (MTTR) for broken builds.
Conclusion
The Sonatype number is a call to action. An 18% decline in maintained projects is not a technical footnote. It affects product delivery, security, and team morale. Development managers must act. Build inventories. Choose tools that give you visibility. Create policy. Train teams. Invest in maintainers when it makes sense.
I am Ermenildo V Castro. I have seen good teams become great when they treat the supply chain like part of the system — not an externality. I tell my teams: plan for the slow current. Build systems that are resilient. Work with your maintainers. And measure what matters. ⚓️
Internal resources you may want to read: supply chain guide, dependency hygiene, platform selection.
External sources referenced in this article: Sonatype State of the Software Supply Chain, Snyk State of Open Source Security 2023, GitHub Octoverse 2023, and SD Times.