“The way OSS is funded today is not sustainable”

Post by chrismcb » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 2:55 AM UTC

p1necone wrote: post #7

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…

Post by zapita » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 3:57 AM UTC

amylene wrote: post #13

zapita wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ana…

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.

Post by eesmith » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 2:33 PM UTC

nemothekid wrote: post #9

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 advan…