Something has to be done to ensure that Open Source which plays a vital role in our business ecosystems remains sustainable. There are real business implications if some package we all depend on is under-funded and implodes (we can all name well-known examples of this from recent history.)
Some projects may be of critical importance to the future, but without a business model they may fizzle out and die. There's an argument that some culling must occur for the overall benefit of the collective, and I have no doubt there is a market-driven solution that we can live with. I don't know if Tidelift is it, but it is definitely an approach.
Yes, there is a crisis. Critical infrastructure is maintained by single developers who get no money for their effort, while the companies using their work make billions.
I'd even say these ads were just one symptom, we'll see more and more until people realize that yes it's fun to use free(dom) software but if you don't follow the other part of the "contact" of contributing in some way, it's not sustainable. Someone once said on HN that FOSS culture has mixed with startup culture and the startup culture doesn't like the pushback, I suspect it's true.
There are also an increasing number of cases in the last few years of such maintainers moving on, and that infrastructure failing soon after that. The event-stream npm debacle, the left-pad npm debacle, the electron-native-notify npm debacle, the rest-client ruby gem debacle, the strong_password ruby gem debacle...
Single points of failures in underpaid open source maintainers are an amazing security risk to critical infrastructure. "Patching" the labor market of open source to better account for the realities of downstream profits relative to upstream labor efforts, might be at least one way to make the entire ecosystem better for everyone.
That doesn’t seem like a crisis to me. Are some of these critical infrastructure devs threatening to quit work unless they are paid. I’m not a big contributor, but I’m pretty familiar with a French projects and the contributions are made specifically because of the license. OSS licenses are designed to let companies make “billions,” that’s a feature not a bug.
please proof this claim... the majority of open source seems to be sustained extremely well... there are some outliers like OpenSSL and others that have been fixed but the majority is well sustained https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-...
What I see in my day to day life is that OSS is generally behind paid systems. I use a bunch of software that I feel annoyed by because they are not as good and are not developing as fast as expensive proprietary alternatives.
Something that can really boost OSS community would be really good, but all I see in the market today are attacks on OSS. For example the recent amazon-mongodb debacle where a proprietary system is stealing money from an open project.
> I’ve spent over 3,000 unpaid hours over the last four years maintaining some popular open source packages.
> Maintainers do critical work which enables companies to create billions of dollars in value, yet we capture none of that value for ourselves.
From TFA, some Open Source contributors are burning themselves at both ends and they should not be reduced to selling paintings on street corners to make ends meet. I'm not arguing that just anyone should be able to earn a living by writing any code and licensing it permissively, but there are some utilities which should be funded that are not, and their ability to obtain funding on their own should perhaps not be the one deciding factor in whether they survive.
In my day job, I frequently insist that programmers are bad at estimating, but they persist in asking for fine-grained estimates and making their business decisions based on them. If the success of a programmer team or product team depends on each individual programmer on the team's capability to always make estimates correctly, then the effort is likely doomed. This is a foundational idea of Agile. You can prove this empirically with enough experience; programmers should focus on making their programming skills better, not on precision time accounting and making sure that to improve estimation to become more accurate. Those things have value, but working software is more valuable. A programmer skill level may be completely orthogonal to the programmer's estimation skills, and many of us may not have the capacity for improving both at the same time.
Similarly, the success or failure of an Open Source project may depend more on the maintainer team's ability to market the project as a product and derive revenue from it.
So, how can we make this easier and more efficient, without forcing everyone to become better at it, individually? (There may not be an answer, but you haven't really taken any time at all to explain what makes Tidelift "not even worth discussing" in your view.)
It's sustainable if you consider important code that we all rely on is being maintained by developers working for free and constantly burning out. Without proper support these developers will move on and stuff is going to get left behind. I mean, just look at OpenSSL a few years ago, almost everything is like that.
It's sustainable if you accept OSS is always going to have an incalculable maintainer churn rate.
I'm not involved in OSS circles, and don't really pay attention to the issues much beyond what I see on HN, but recently in a survey I completed for a tech company there were a number of questions asking my opinion on whether OSS is still a sustainable model, and if I believed it would be around 5, 10, 15, 20 years in the future.
So you admit you don't really know much about the matter, but consider your opinion qualified by virtue of somebody asking you for your opinion?
Yes, I admit that I don't know much about OSS. But I did not state that I have a qualified opinion. In fact, I answered "Don't know/no opinion" on those questions.
The reason I posted my reply was to indicate that there must be some people worried about the situation, or it wouldn't have appeared in a survey from a very large, frequently mentioned on HN, tech company.
You can ask me what I think about inflation but that wouldn't make me an economist, would it?
No, but you could relay the fact that somewhere there are people who are apparently concerned enough about inflation to ask you about it.
Would there be any significance to the question if the people asking about it weren't themselves economists?
It's a strange question, to ask if OSS will still be around that far in the future. It (albeit without the name) has been around longer than proprietary software. Did your survey ask if proprietary software would still be around in 20 years? I think it should have.
https://tidelift.com/
Something has to be done to ensure that Open Source which plays a vital role in our business ecosystems remains sustainable. There are real business implications if some package we all depend on is under-funded and implodes (we can all name well-known examples of this from recent history.)
Some projects may be of critical importance to the future, but without a business model they may fizzle out and die. There's an argument that some culling must occur for the overall benefit of the collective, and I have no doubt there is a market-driven solution that we can live with. I don't know if Tidelift is it, but it is definitely an approach.