But the whole reason they are relied upon is them coming for free. If sudo users where expected to give something back it wouldn't have landed on millions of machines in the first place.
FOSS coming for free means, of course, maintenance being dependent on the authors' whims. Not paying means not being owed anything.
Yes, that's not sustainable. FOSS is a gift from the developers to the world. It's not a business model or a way to make a living (at best it's part of a strategy to make a living).
It would be great if we all could gift something back be that help with maintaining or money.
But we should be careful not to demand support. Everyone "whising up" and only relying on software they either maintain themselves or paid someone to maintain might look different than we imagine. Might just be people buying proprietary software rather than funding open source development.
No, there aren't two, there are three; the third one is the one you slid by:
> rewriting all the software you depend on
If sudo bugs don't get fixed by the existing developer(s), companies that depend on sudo will just end up writing their own. I suspect that in most cases companies will see that as cheaper than having to pay an open source library developer, who is not an employee, to maintain an open source library that is not under the company's control. So if the open source developer isn't donating their work for free, the companies probably won't end up using it at all.
This. This is the conversation we need to have.
However, I doubt that a public company on the USA stock exchanges -- which by definition is concerned with a Capitalist maximization of shareholder value, can rely on donations.
They need to be able to return venture capital money at a multiple. So, why did they take the cash in the first place? So that they can build a company to govern and employ the team members and build expertise to fund the R&D needed to build the product and support customers.
It seems unfair to me that a company with deep resources chooses to fork and modify instead of investing in the company and owning a stake to help influence the roadmap and/or enter into a resale / partnership model for monetization.
It's a tough scenario and it needs to be discussed.
> There are a lot of projects (sudo being the most recent example) supported by a team of developers in the single digits (or just one) that are relied upon by projects raking in millions if not billions in annual revenue.
But they gave it away for free. That would be the same whether there were big, small or zero companies using the software.
I think probably the problem is framed wrong:
- maybe giving software away free was a bad idea (I don't believe this; just putting it on the table for conversation)
- maybe those giving away their software free should make better calls _for themselves_ about how they spend their time
- maybe use different licensing
- stop calling it free; instead call it "free a the point of consumption" and consciously build a model to support that at the outset (this is my current personal opinion, but I grew up in the Uk when it had a functional NHS so I'm biassed)
- dig deep on what both "free as in beer" and "free as in speech" mean to you and how they relate and what you want to do about that
Open source came out of a joyous utopianism that hasn't been backed up the wider societal changes needed to sustain it. This is understandable because that work is ridiculously hard (and I'm aware some people _are_ trying to make those changes. I just day-dream about it).
Currently, most of the world works on capitalism, for better or worse. I'm not trying to defend or attack capitalism here, but when you work in a capitalist system and _all_ your other interests and life support systems use capitalism, you have to factor that into your thinking. Open source makes more sense in a post-scaricity society and we're not there yet. FOSS might even help us get there, and the problems we're seeing in the past 3-4 years might be the signs of things changing.
I know this message sounds like victim blaming, and that's a real problem in some situations, but I don't think this is the situation here. Everyone working in tech is at a higher than average level of privilege than their immediate peers; working in FOSS is a choice you make from that position of privilege.
There are a lot of projects (sudo being the most recent example) supported by a team of developers in the single digits (or just one) that are relied upon by projects raking in millions if not billions in annual revenue.
Finding ways to give back and keep the developers motivated is important in the long term, unless you plan on rewriting all the software you depend on.
Currently the two sustainable answers for that are:
1. Hope some company is generous in hiring said OSS developer and paying them a salary to continue working on that OSS work (ideally without too much pressure to modify it for that one company's use case).
2. Make that developer spend a lot of time doing marketing to generate donations/sponsorships to a level where the developer can pay for things like food, shelter, and insurance.