We are currently in an age where a large portion of open source apps are actively maintained, users understand more about open source than ever before and open source software is almost as good, if not better, than their proprietary counterparts.
This is just a huge thank you to anyone and everyone involved in the making and maintaining of open source software.
As a regular tester, I do my best to provide any feedback I can to make your vision come to fruition.
I think that one of the structural change that helped a lot to have less stalled or unmaintained open source projects is the improvement in the DevOps tools.
I mean that, until recently, I always had been an open source user and supporter but, despite being a professional software engineer, I never coded in open source projects. The reason to this is that I did not wanted to commit myself into a project that I cannot afford to work regularly on because of professional and/or personal time constraints.
Now with the broad use of git and related platforms for open source projects (GitHub, gitlab, …), it’s possible to work only a little on open source projects. You can fix a bug impacting you as an user, translate some strings in your native language, improve the doc, … without commiting to work regularly on the project. You just change the stuff, have no requirements to inform anyone, make a pull request and it’s merged or not by the maintener …
I think this is really what contributed to improvement in the way open source projects evolved.
This is how I was able to contribute to a major Python library on GitHub. Their CI and test coverage was impressive, and ensured my little bug fix won’t break everything for the many users of the library.
The community effect is massive!