The most critical code on Earth — powering banks, hospitals, governments, aircraft, and the internet itself — is maintained by people who often aren’t paid at all. Behind billion-dollar platforms and global tech giants lies a fragile foundation of open-source code… sustained by exhausted volunteers, late-night patches, and invisible heroes who can’t afford rent while holding up the digital world. Log4j proved the danger — one unpaid developer, one overlooked library, and the internet nearly collapsed. Yet trillion-dollar companies still treat open source as “free labor,” outsourcing responsibility while profiting from work they don’t fund. This isn’t a software bug — it’s a systemic failure. If the infrastructure of the world runs on unpaid labor, what happens when the people behind it burn out, disappear, or simply stop. #OpenSourceCrisis #techtruth #digitalinfrastructure #FutureOfSoftware