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The Internet Was Built on the Free Labor of Open Source Developers. Is That Sustainable?

posted by chromas on Friday February 15 2019, @10:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the yes dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Motherboard:

On the surface, the open source software community has never been better. Companies and governments are adopting open source software at rates that would’ve been unfathomable 20 years ago, and a whole new generation of programmers are cutting their teeth on developing software in plain sight and making it freely available for anyone to use. Go a little deeper, however, and the cracks start to show.

The ascendancy of open source has placed a mounting burden on the maintainers of popular software, who now handle more bug reports, feature requests, code reviews, and code commits than ever before. At the same time, open source developers must also deal with an influx of corporate users who are unfamiliar with community norms when it comes to producing and consuming open source software. This leads to developer burnout and a growing feeling of resentment toward the companies that rely on free labor to produce software that is folded into products and sold back to consumers for huge profits.

The Free Rider Problem rears its head again?

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @04:43PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @04:43PM (#802074)

    The 'sustainable' idea is coming from the people with money. They are throwing that word around like it means something to them. So it is 'leaking' to other portions of the money stack and their sycophants in 'the media'. I know I sit through 'sustainability' trainings at large money company.

    There is a nugget of an idea here that people seem to be missing.

    Once the 'itch scratchers' have scratched the itch they move on. So it takes money to keep people involved. Where does that money come from? We can speculate and make up 'the way' but it usually takes someone seeing some sort of value in it and willing to pay for it.

    We have built a monster with open source. Much of it is basically abandoned or in 'maintenance mode'. It is no surprise with the uprise of new fuzzing teq's that we are seeing an avalanche of bugs. That no one really wants to fix. The openssl and libressl was a very good example of one major project just like that.

  • (Score: 2) by exaeta on Sunday February 17 2019, @02:59AM

    by exaeta (6957) on Sunday February 17 2019, @02:59AM (#802329) Homepage Journal
    Great Open Source sucks. The problem is that proprietary code is no better. Need funding? Who needs to fix bugs? Features sell products. Fixing bugs just wastes time! While I see flaws with the open source model, on balamce, it does a decent job. One thing that might work even better is something like tenued public interest coders, whose job is to write code in the public interest without much concern for what people want to pay for. Kind of like judges. Insulation from corporate and monetary pressures might help us develop better code. Just a thought.
    --
    The Government is a Bird