André Staltz Why is maintenance such a big hurdle in many open source projects? It is often the primary reason for burnouts among maintainers. I recently realized that many open source projects have the opportunity of progressing independently from their original authors if there is the right culture in the community. Not all projects can do this, though. What I’ll describe here mostly applies to small open source libraries, not large libraries neither end-user software. So. A year ago, I stumbled upon this tool for JavaScript projects called patch-package , by David Sheldrick . It allowed me to create small patches to apply on dependencies, that persist throughout npm installations and deletions. I used it to customize small aspects of some of my dependencies to work properly with my software project. It allowed me to “maintain” a third-party library without bothering its origi...