Critical Open‑Source Maintainer Shortage

Major cloud infrastructure components are often maintained by tiny volunteer teams; when those maintainers burn out or leave, widely deployed software becomes 'abandonware' despite continuing production use, creating concentrated operational and security risk across enterprises and public services. The Kubernetes Ingress NGINX retirement — following a remote‑root‑level vulnerability and the maintainers’ winding down — shows how a single un/underfunded OSS project can imperil many clusters. — This reframes cloud resilience as partly a public‑economy problem: governments, vendors, and large consumers must fund or take stewardship of critical open‑source projects to avoid systemic outages and security crises.