Drawing on my experiences maintaining Puma and other open-source projects, both volunteer and for pay, I'd like to share what I think is a "third way" for sustainable open source, between the extremes of "everyone deserves to be paid" and "everyone's on their own". Instead of viewing maintainers as valuable resources, this third way posits that maintainers are blockers to a potentially-unlimited pool of contributors, and a maintainer's #1 job is encouraging contribution.