Posted on September 23, 2026 by Mario Fahlandt, CNCF Ambassador Neutrality is quietly the hardest part of open source. It gets tricky the moment someone pays your salary — and staying honest about it takes more effort than anyone admits. Here’s something we don’t say out loud often enough: most of us doing open source are paid to do it, at least part of the time. And this isn’t just a hunch.
When Google’s Open Source Programs Office surveyed over a thousand contributors in 2023, they found that 82% of us do open source at least partly on paid time — and only 18% are pure hobbyists working purely on their own clock. More than half do both, blending personal passion with a paycheck. So the romantic picture of open source as a world of unpaid volunteers? It’s real for about one in five of us. For everyone else, a company is somewhere in the mix. That’s not a bad thing, it’s how a huge amount of great work actually gets funded.
But it does mean that conflicts of interest aren’t some rare edge case you might bump into one day. They’re there from the start, for basically all of us. And it only gets more tangled the longer you stick around. Give it time and you’re rarely wearing just one label. Maybe you maintain a project, help run a working group, represent your employer somewhere, and volunteer for something on the side. But every one of those roles comes with its own responsibilities, its own audience, and its own quiet set of interests. Keeping them straight isn’t a nice-to-have.
The single most useful habit I’ve picked up is asking myself a small question, over and over: who’s actually speaking right now and in what capacity? When you give a talk, sit for an interview, or drop a comment in a meeting, which version of you is talking? The person representing their team? Those aren’t the same voice, and quietly blurring them is how you end up nudging decisions you had no real standing to nudge. That’s why, in a lot of meetings, people take a second to make it explicit: something as simple as “just to be clear, I’m saying this as a maintainer, not on behalf of my employer.