[This is a sad look at the economic sustainability of open source software](https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html). It also brings to mind inequality since you have to have some alternate form of income to run an open source project. That likely limits women and minorities from even looking at contributing because they have bills to pay.

For women it may even be worse since they take a much bigger share of unpaid work around the house, even if they work full-time like their partner. It’s less likely that women will have the leisure time to contribute to open source software, which means we’re missing some excellent developers having input into our software. It also means we’re limiting our input from these crucial groups of women and minorities in usability.

That only exacerbates the problems we have with software designed by white dudes, used by white dudes, that doesn’t take into account the needs of anyone but white dudes.

I don’t have an answer to make it better, but we need to be looking.