Post

James Munns
@jamesmunns.com

I don't have a totally coherent view on this, but having spent time in this space, OSS funding is just *weird*. Users treat popular projects like products, and how software gets done somewhat reinforces that (packaging, "the ecosystem", etc.). A very tiny # of people do (or even could!) make money.

Carl Lerche@carllerche.com

I'm just going to say it, I really don't like the "how do we make OSS sustainable" framing. OSS is already sustainable. The only thing not sustainable is users expecting a free lunch (support, LTS, bug fixes, ...). As a user, you are responsible for your OSS usage. Fork/patch if you need to.

Carl Lerche
@carllerche.com

I think a big issue is maintainers being guilted into maintenance. This is a community issue. Entire communities, including Rust, have an assumption that an OSS project will be maintained. It would be better to assume OSS is provided as is, no warranties. This is a community issue.

Carl Lerche
@carllerche.com

The flip side of this is taking offense, or considering that you "failed" if your project got forked. Forking should be done freely to add your own modifications to the software without having to go via upstream.

James Munns
@jamesmunns.com

Yeah! I think that totally agrees with what I said down thread. A huge of it is "expectation mismatch", between: * how it actually is today * how we want it to be at some point in the future (ideological or temporal or aspirational mismatch) * how it could be intentionally misunderstood to be

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James Munns
@jamesmunns.com

I think at some point "an aspirational dream of what could be in the future" rapidly decomposes into "a cudgel used against maintainers and potential newcomers" when the excitement or funding or time of the original effort hollows out. I don't know how to fix this, holistically.

James Munns
@jamesmunns.com

I do think that the funding and paid time to improve OSS being SO threadbare also drastically worsens inter-project relations, and leads to spite in any perceived competition: suddenly colleagues become competitors, if There Can Be Only One whatever library that becomes the winner of funding.