The Invisible Open Source Infrastructure We Are Failing to Fund

Originally published in LinkedIn on 10. januar 2026. Source: original article.

We often talk about "digital infrastructure" as if it were a bridge, a building, or a single national project. Something solid, bounded, and designed from the top down. In reality, it is nothing like that. Digital infrastructure is closer to a forest: a living, growing, and fragile ecosystem of libraries, frameworks, tools, and small pieces of software. It has no single owner, no master plan, and no central architect. Yet everything we build depends on it.

The recent story about Tailwind CSS should worry anyone who depends on open source. That is basically all of us.

Despite Tailwind being more popular and more widely used than ever, traffic to their documentation is down around 40%, and their revenue has reportedly dropped close to 80%. Not because the project is less relevant, but because the way developers find and consume knowledge is changing. The economic model behind maintaining critical open source infrastructure is quietly breaking.

It is tempting to frame this as a "developers vs AI" story. It is not. This is a much bigger and more structural shift.

We are in the middle of a fundamental change in how digital knowledge is accessed and reused. The result is that the building blocks of the digital world, open source libraries, frameworks, and components, are becoming more important than ever, while the people and teams who maintain them are losing both visibility and funding.

This should be a wake-up call for the development community too. Donors, multilaterals, NGOs, and public institutions increasingly depend on open source at the core of their digital systems. Yet almost all of this relies on small teams, sometimes single individuals, maintaining software that sits at the very bottom of critical infrastructure.

In the development community, we are highly effective at funding projects, organisations, and in-country delivery. But we systematically neglect the underlying infrastructure, and we almost never talk about, let alone fund, the open source building blocks our entire digital ecosystem depends on.

The Tailwind story is not an exception. It is a signal.

If we want resilient, sustainable digital ecosystems, we need to start treating critical open source software as what it really is: long-term infrastructure that needs predictable support, not just short-term project funding. Otherwise, we are slowly building more and more of our societies on top of an invisible and increasingly fragile foundation.