Maintainer Month: Reflecting on open source’s hidden heroes
Last updated on: 30th May 2025| 30th May 2025 | Open Fifth | Community
We proudly support open source software, including Koha library management system (LMS), Aspen Discovery, and Metabase. These products are used by libraries throughout the UK and around the world, with Koha LMS alone used in over 18,000 libraries. A network of software maintainers, contributors, users and supporters makes this possible and enables Open Fifth to provide powerful, flexible software solutions to libraries throughout the UK and beyond.
At Open Fifth, we are committed to our active role in the global open source communities for these products, including specific roles as maintainers, testers, on release teams, and in their governance.
What is a maintainer?
According to the Linux Foundation, there’s ‘no fixed definition for maintainers but broadly, the term refers to those contributors who lead an open source project.’ They may be decision makers for what source code goes into a release, undertake code review, steer the direction of a project, review pull requests, release new software, handle fixes, and participate in community management and moderation.
Collaboration and community involvement are primary open source principles. Users and developers are all able to contribute to projects. Maintainers, however, go that bit further. They take on key roles and responsibilities as stewards for open source projects.
Read more about GitHub Maintainer Month.
Maintaining open source library software
Koha LMS, and Aspen Discovery have strong global development and user communities. These communities, including libraries themselves, drive continuous improvement, bug fixes and new features. They are all working towards a common purpose facilitated through their active maintainers – fantastic library software.
Many individuals and organisations have roles in supporting these products, you can take a look here:
- The Koha release teams and roles are available to view on the Koha Community Wiki.
- The latest Aspen Discovery release notes lists contributors and roles for individuals and organisations who have been involved.
Open Fifth’s role in the community
We don’t just use open source software, we contribute back to it, create it, and maintain it through our community roles. This also means that our customers get a voice in developing the software they use.
Lots of the Open Fifth team take part in sharing feedback, testing and documentation for the products we support. Here’s a special shout-out to the team members who have taken on significant roles in these communities:
- Martin Renvoize
- Pedro Amorim
- Matt Blenkinsop
- Alexander Blanchard
- Chloe Zermatten
- Aude Charillon
- Jacob O’Mara
- Jake Deery.
Thank you for your role in keeping open source software transparent, collaborative and community-focused.
Thank you!
This Maintainer Month, we’re sharing our appreciation for all of the work that goes into the software that our customers use everyday.
We thank all Koha and Aspen Discovery customers who have provided feedback for improvements. We thank all contributors who have submitted bug reports, written code, or tested new releases and features. And, most of all, we thank all of the maintainers for Koha, Aspen Discovery, and beyond, for the vital work they do!
