---
title: "Dependencies and maintainers"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/dependencies-and-maintainers-g6avweuse
source_url: https://drewdevault.com/2020/02/06/Dependencies-and-maintainers.html
type: article
source: "Drew DeVault"
published: 2026-03-31T12:28:41.159Z
updated: 2026-03-31T12:42:24.508Z
tags: ["open-source", "npm"]
reading_time: 4
upvotes: 0
comments: 0
language: en
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Dependencies and maintainers

**[Drew DeVault](https://daily.dev/sources/drewdevault)** · 4 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A reflection on the open source sustainability problem, prompted by a FOSDEM talk covering incidents like left-pad, event-stream, and heartbleed. The core argument is that developers and organizations who depend on hundreds or thousands of libraries they've never examined are creating the conditions for these failures themselves. The author advocates for knowing your dependency graph deeply, engaging personally with maintainers, and treating open source as a community of people rather than a collection of black-box utilities.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://drewdevault.com/2020/02/06/Dependencies-and-maintainers.html>

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---

Tags: [#open-source](https://daily.dev/tags/open-source), [#npm](https://daily.dev/tags/npm)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/dependencies-and-maintainers-g6avweuse)