Material-UI: The Move to a Sustainable Open Source Project
When Material-UI was created 3 years ago, we never imagined that it would enjoy so much popularity. Currently, it has over 30k stars on GitHub, over 600k downloads last month on npm, and over 500 contributors. As the project grew, so did the workload to maintain it. Olivier Tassinari has put in countless hours over the years to not only maintain the project, but also head up an ambitious rewrite that addresses many shortcomings of the original version. We needed a way to support Olivier and other core contributors so that they didn’t have to choose between working on Material-UI and other projects that pay.
Inspiration from the Community
The challenges we’re facing don’t seem to be exclusive to Material-UI. Webpack faced similar challenges and have been successful in reaching a $400k+ annual budget. Other projects have successfully used ads to sustain their open source development.
It’s become clear that Material-UI must take steps to move towards a more sustainable future and we as a community must rise to the challenge of supporting the projects that we’ve come to depend on.
Moving Material-UI to a New Home
Material-UI currently resides within the Call-Em-All organization on GitHub. We’ve created a new organization called mui-org to house the project going forward. This is a long-term decision that will not only give maintainers greater control, but the ability to consolidate many stand-alone open source projects created by its core contributors. We’ll do our best to make this transition as painless as possible, and you shouldn’t notice any disruptions to our npm registry or documentation site.
Call-Em-All is glad to have supported Material-UI over the years and we’re happy to continue this support as we take steps to ensure Material-UI’s future. Special thanks to Olivier and the awesome contributors that have worked tirelessly to make the project what it is today. We hope that you’ll join us in building a more sustainable future.
Update: 12/21/2017 — We’ve made some progress towards sustainability. Read about it here:
