[$] "Critical" projects and volunteer maintainers

Over the last five decades or so, free and open-source software (FOSS) has
gone from an almost unknown
quantity available to only the most technically savvy to underpinning much
of the infrastructure we rely on today. Much like software itself, FOSS is
"eating the world". But that has changed—is changing—the role of the
maintainers of all of that code; when "critical" infrastructure uses code
from a FOSS project, suddenly, and perhaps without warning, that code
itself becomes critical. But many maintainers of that software are
volunteers who did not set out to become beholden to the needs of large
companies and organizations when they released their code, they were just
scratching their itch—now lots of others are clamoring for theirs to be
scratched as well.