On May 18, the lead developer of pgBackRest announced that this widely used backup and recovery tool within the PostgreSQL ecosystem would continue to be maintained. The whole situation originated from an April 27 announcement stating that maintenance would cease — the developer revealed that after Crunchy Data, the project’s main corporate sponsor, was sold, funding dried up. Despite efforts to secure a new job or raise funds independently, he ultimately had to call off further development after 13 years of work, suggesting users could fork the project under a new name if needed. This announcement sparked a massive outpouring of support from both individual users and enterprises, prompting an update on May 4 in which the developer expressed hope that operations could resume via a joint sponsorship model, asking the community to stay patient and refrain from forking for now.
On May 18, that joint sponsorship model finally took shape: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Supabase, pgEdge, Tiger Data (the developer behind TimescaleDB), Percona, and Eon.io each pledged financial support, ensuring the project no longer relies on a single sponsor and drastically reducing the likelihood of similar crises recurring. The developer also plans to onboard additional maintainers to share the workload and guarantee continuity; meanwhile, several new features and optimizations are already in development and will be rolled out in future releases. This swift transition — from an impending halt in development to a six-party consortium just three weeks later — stands as a textbook example of collective action within the open-source community.