
“The way OSS is funded today is not sustainable” - teinac
https://twitter.com/solomonstre/status/1222318288803266560
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MoronInAHurry
Why is a single tweet that doesn't say anything of substance getting upvoted?
What value are people getting out of this?

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adventured
Upvoters want to read and or partake in the discussion that will go with it.

I'd wager that for many of the users here, the discussions are routinely far
more valuable than the linked content. The linked content and its title are
merely the spark to go from. You'll often see people admit in the comment
threads that they skip reading the linked content and go right to the
comments.

It means the title: the way OSS is funded today is not sustainable - is of
high interest, people want to have _that_ conversation.

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p1necone
I'll chime in as a data point - I generally find the comment section on hacker
news to be of way more value than most articles too.

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nemothekid
I’m not sure if he’s completely serious about the roads analogy. IMO roads are
funded like OSS, but in OSS we just skip the whole elected officials part and
go straight to oligarchy.

In other terms the oligarchs (Google, the auto industry) put money into
projects that they directly benefit them (k8s, roads) while sidelining popular
projects that don’t (public transit, $your_favorite_OSS).

I don’t really see the advantage of moving the gatekeepers from a set of
corporate engineers to an “elected” group of people who will likely be
completely made up of people who work at those same corporate jobs who have
the time to do OSS politics.

Maybe there is another way, but this post is really critical of the “roads”
analogy.

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zapita
I agree with your first two paragraphs completely. But your conclusion
surprised me and I disagree with it.

If the current OSS is funded by oligarchs, and we agree that is not ideal,
wouldn’t it make sense to look at how democratic governments mitigate the
oligarch problem by funding their infrastructure in a way that better
represents the interests of all their constituents? I think that’s the point
of the roads analogy.

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amylene
One explanation is that democracies have sufficient friction built in that
oligarchs can’t take control. The more broadly inefficient something is, the
harder it is to take full control.

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zapita
I don’t think that idea holds up in practice. If you know anyone who has lived
under non-democratic government, ask them how efficient it was.

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ksaj
They said that back in the 90's. Repeatedly. I don't bother reading articles
with these kinds of headlines anymore. Nobody's throwing anything to the wind.

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brenden2
To the contrary, the fact that open source software is more successful now
than it has ever been suggests the system is working well.

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p1necone
On the other hand, I think it's kinda nice that open source exists outside of
our capitalist economy. I don't think you can really argue that it _isn 't
working_ \- lots of people are fine with contributing to open source because
they enjoy writing code that helps more than just them, just that maybe it
would be nice if more of this labor was paid for.

We have to be very careful trying to extract _money_ out of working on open
source, I wouldn't want to see the same kind of perversion of incentives that
causes large enterprise companies to produce absolutely godawful software come
to open source projects too. (See Linus' many famous rants against commercial
contributors trying to push crap into Linux for examples of this).

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chrismcb
Open source doesn't exist outside of our capitalist society.

