Stewarding the React Foundation

Open source has a sustainability problem that nobody wants to talk about honestly.

The story we tell ourselves is beautiful: passionate developers building in the open, sharing their work freely, creating infrastructure that powers the modern world. And that story is true — as far as it goes. But it leaves out the part where maintainers burn out. Where critical dependencies go unmaintained for years. Where the economics of "free" eventually collide with the reality of bills that need paying and families that need supporting.

React is used by millions of developers. It's the foundation beneath applications that billions of people use every day. For most of its history, it's existed primarily as a Meta project — resourced by a corporation, governed by its priorities, dependent on its continued investment.

That model worked. Until you start asking: what happens if it doesn't?

The React Foundation exists to answer that question. And as its first Executive Director, I've spent the last year learning something humbling: sustainability isn't a technical problem. It's not even primarily a funding problem. It's a trust problem.

The Governance Question

Here's what I've observed about open source governance: everyone wants it in theory, and almost everyone resists it in practice.

Governance means process. It means structure. It means that your brilliant idea doesn't get merged just because you think it's brilliant — it has to survive scrutiny, earn consensus, prove its value to a community that might see things differently than you do.

For maintainers who've poured years into a project, this can feel like bureaucracy invading their creation. For corporations who depend on the project, it can feel like control slipping away. For individual contributors, it can feel like their voices getting lost in committee.

And yet. Without governance, you don't have a community. You have a benevolent dictatorship that works until the dictator burns out, loses interest, or makes a decision that fragments the ecosystem.

The React Foundation's governance model is built on a simple principle: decisions should be traceable. When the community asks "why did this happen?", there should be an answer that points to a process, not just a person.

We've introduced RIS scoring — a framework for evaluating React Improvement Suggestions that makes the criteria for acceptance explicit and consistent. We've created the Community of Interested Stakeholders, which gives organizations that depend on React a structured voice in its direction without giving any single organization control.

These aren't exciting innovations. They're plumbing. But plumbing is what makes a house livable long-term. Governance is what makes an open source project sustainable after the founders move on.

The Funding Reality

Let me tell you something uncomfortable about open source economics: "free as in beer" has consequences.

When software is free to use, the people and organizations who benefit most from it have no structural obligation to support its development. This works fine when a project is small — passion and curiosity can fuel a lot of late nights. It works fine when a project is backed by a corporation with aligned incentives.

But React is neither small nor dependent on a single corporate sponsor. It's critical infrastructure for the modern web, maintained by people who deserve to be compensated for their expertise, used by companies generating billions in revenue.

The question isn't whether money should flow into open source. The question is: how do you build funding models that don't corrupt the thing they're trying to sustain?

We're piloting what I call "blended models" — funding structures that align contributor incentives with community outcomes. Companies don't just write checks; they invest in specific areas that serve their needs while benefiting everyone. Want better TypeScript integration? Fund the work and own the outcome. Want more robust testing infrastructure? Same deal.

This isn't philanthropy. It's enlightened self-interest, channeled through structures that prevent any single funder from capturing the project. The foundation exists partly to be the entity that can accept these investments without compromising React's independence.

It's early days. We're learning what works and what creates perverse incentives. But the alternative — continuing to depend on corporate goodwill with no backup plan — isn't really an alternative at all.

The Global Challenge

React's community is global in a way that's easy to underestimate if you spend most of your time in Silicon Valley.

There are React developers in Lagos and São Paulo and Jakarta who face constraints that would be unrecognizable to someone working at a well-funded startup in San Francisco. Unreliable internet connections. Hardware limitations. Documentation that assumes fluency in English and familiarity with Western development practices.

There are also insights and innovations emerging from these communities that never make it back to the "center" because the channels don't exist. Different problems produce different solutions. Different constraints produce different creativity.

The foundation's global engagement strategy isn't charity work. It's ecosystem development. When we support meetups in underserved regions, we're not just being nice — we're creating pathways for talent and ideas to flow in both directions.

Contributor cohorts have been one of our most successful programs. We identify promising developers who've never contributed to React core, pair them with experienced maintainers, and create supported pathways to meaningful contribution. The goal isn't just to get more code merged; it's to diversify the perspectives that shape React's future.

Shared documentation efforts matter more than they might appear. When React's learning resources are accessible to someone whose first language isn't English, who learned to code through a bootcamp in Nairobi, who's building applications for users with very different expectations — that's not localization. That's expanding the boundaries of what React can become.

The Loops That Sustain

Here's how I think about the work ahead: three reinforcing loops that either strengthen each other or, if any one fails, undermine the whole system.

Governance creates trust. When decisions are transparent and processes are fair, people invest more deeply in the community. They contribute not because they have to, but because they believe their contributions will be valued and protected.

Funding enables sustainability. When maintainers are compensated fairly and infrastructure is properly resourced, the project can evolve at the pace the ecosystem needs. Critical work doesn't wait for someone to find volunteer time.

Global participation expands the tent. When the community includes voices from everywhere React is used — which is everywhere software is built — the project becomes more robust, more creative, more capable of serving the actual diversity of its users.

Each loop feeds the others. Better governance attracts more funding because sponsors trust their investment will be stewarded well. More funding enables broader global engagement because the resources exist to do the work. Broader participation improves governance because more perspectives surface more problems before they become crises.

This isn't a plan that completes. It's a system that sustains. And building systems that sustain is the real work of open source stewardship.

The Long Game

I don't know exactly what React will look like in ten years. The framework will evolve — that's what frameworks do. New paradigms will emerge. Some of what feels essential today will become historical curiosity.

What I do know is that the community's capacity to navigate that evolution depends on choices we make now. Whether we build governance structures that can outlast any individual leader. Whether we create funding models that sustain without corrupting. Whether we cultivate a global community that brings the full diversity of human creativity to bear on the problems ahead.

The React Foundation is my bet that these things are possible. That open source can be more than passionate individuals burning out for the privilege of building infrastructure the world depends on. That sustainability is achievable if we're willing to do the unglamorous work of institution-building.

It's not the most exciting work I've ever done. But I'm increasingly convinced it might be the most important.