“The way OSS is funded today is not sustainable” | Hacker News Reader

“The way OSS is funded today is not sustainable”

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25 pointsteinac15 comments

Why is a single tweet that doesn't say anything of substance getting upvoted? What value are people getting out of this?

Possibly because of the followup discussion thread?

controversial title --> more "hacker" "news" upvotes

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.

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.

"This thing is unsustainable but will go on indefinitely without a change"

This does/does not have substance kind of like a moebius strip does/does not have two sides.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Concerning the roads analogy, see https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-report... - "Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure"

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.

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

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).

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

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