There area huge number of libraries are are becoming unmaintained due to lack of resources, which will likely cause problems down the line.

I'm not sure I'd call it a crisis, but it's definitely a problem.

There are flaws in OpenSSL and they were corrected. Sometimes projects like gpg die off. That stinks, but there are other options.

Single points of failures in underpaid open source maintainers are an amazing security risk to critical infrastructure. "Patching" the labor market of open source to better account for the realities of downstream profits relative to upstream labor efforts, might be at least one way to make the entire ecosystem better for everyone.

Something that can really boost OSS community would be really good, but all I see in the market today are attacks on OSS. For example the recent amazon-mongodb debacle where a proprietary system is stealing money from an open project.

> Maintainers do critical work which enables companies to create billions of dollars in value, yet we capture none of that value for ourselves.

From TFA, some Open Source contributors are burning themselves at both ends and they should not be reduced to selling paintings on street corners to make ends meet. I'm not arguing that just anyone should be able to earn a living by writing any code and licensing it permissively, but there are some utilities which should be funded that are not, and their ability to obtain funding on their own should perhaps not be the one deciding factor in whether they survive.

In my day job, I frequently insist that programmers are bad at estimating, but they persist in asking for fine-grained estimates and making their business decisions based on them. If the success of a programmer team or product team depends on each individual programmer on the team's capability to always make estimates correctly, then the effort is likely doomed. This is a foundational idea of Agile. You can prove this empirically with enough experience; programmers should focus on making their programming skills better, not on precision time accounting and making sure that to improve estimation to become more accurate. Those things have value, but working software is more valuable. A programmer skill level may be completely orthogonal to the programmer's estimation skills, and many of us may not have the capacity for improving both at the same time.

Similarly, the success or failure of an Open Source project may depend more on the maintainer team's ability to market the project as a product and derive revenue from it.

So, how can we make this easier and more efficient, without forcing everyone to become better at it, individually? (There may not be an answer, but you haven't really taken any time at all to explain what makes Tidelift "not even worth discussing" in your view.)

It's sustainable if you accept OSS is always going to have an incalculable maintainer churn rate.

I think there might be.

I'm not involved in OSS circles, and don't really pay attention to the issues much beyond what I see on HN, but recently in a survey I completed for a tech company there were a number of questions asking my opinion on whether OSS is still a sustainable model, and if I believed it would be around 5, 10, 15, 20 years in the future.

You can ask me what I think about inflation but that wouldn't make me an economist, would it?

So you admit you don't really know much about the matter, but consider your opinion qualified by virtue of somebody asking you for your opinion?

Yes, I admit that I don't know much about OSS. But I did not state that I have a qualified opinion. In fact, I answered "Don't know/no opinion" on those questions.

The reason I posted my reply was to indicate that there must be some people worried about the situation, or it wouldn't have appeared in a survey from a very large, frequently mentioned on HN, tech company.

You can ask me what I think about inflation but that wouldn't make me an economist, would it?

No, but you could relay the fact that somewhere there are people who are apparently concerned enough about inflation to ask you about it.

It's a strange question, to ask if OSS will still be around that far in the future. It (albeit without the name) has been around longer than proprietary software. Did your survey ask if proprietary software would still be around in 20 years? I think it should have.