Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure | Hacker News Reader

Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure

fordfoundation.org

61 pointscolinprince13 comments

If you're not aware of Nadia Eghbal you should be: https://twitter.com/nayafia - she is a seriously seriously wonderful human, and I'm lucky to call her a friend. I met her via Justin Johnson from KeenIO a couple years back when she had started her mission. The long and the short of it is that she wanted to understand how to better support software developers who work on OSS however are not being compensated for it. She comes from being a venture capitalist, not purely a technologist, and now works at Github. The report she wrote is excellent and I (obviously) recommend not only reading it, but sharing it with non-technical folks.

Seconded. I met her only once (through the also excellent John Komkov of LSVP) here in SF and I was really impressed by her maturity and view of things, despite the relatively young age and no previous experience in OSS.

I hate when this analogy is used for open source. It paints an image of these tools being critical but having to be maintained by "other professionals that professionally open source".

The major difference with software is that you as a developer can immensely help! When a bridge falls into disrepair, you can't just start pouring concrete yourself. But when you encounter a bug in open source, not only can you make a huge difference just by filing a detailed bug report, but you can even fix it yourself and possibly for everyone else.

This model just doesn't work and that's exactly what the paper linked in the OP is about. Look at OpenSSL, everyone was (is) using it, one guy was maintaining it and barely earning a salary to do so.

Seriously, read the OP, it's well worth your time and makes an extremely solid case. It's both well-researched and well-written.

Uh, I think you are reiterating my point. Because people just think that open source is maintained "by someone else", it becomes a tragedy of the commons issue.

If we stop perpetuating the idea that it's something different than regular software that anyone can modify, then maybe we can get more contributions.

> The owner of this website (www.fordfoundation.org) has banned the country or region your IP address is in (RU) from accessing this website

Well, I don't see any roads or bridges...

Surprisingly good reading and very well written.

Maybe Peter Their could influence the Trump administration to provide federal funding for open source projects used in government and private sector projects.

I would suggest a simple 5$ / year per machine default donation as the best way for the government to support open source. Direct funding opens the way for a lot of 'waste' and corruption.

Donated to whom? There's no central body to receive and distribute these donations. Somebody still has to turn the indirect funding into direct funding to actually get the money into the hands of the developers building the infrastructure; your 'waste' and corruption are just moving out of the government and into whatever body you designate.

That's less of a problem than you might think. The most popular oss have associated non profits. Otherwise just keep the money.

That's true only of the most popular OSS projects but the infrastructure described in the OP is much more general about that. I strongly recommend actually reading the full paper, it talks about the difficulty in funding these projects because of it's highly distributed nature.

Will read the whole thing but the excerpts I've read are excellent.

Also slightly off topic but that is one beautiful document from a layout/typography point of view.

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