Surely you’ve seen volunteers join existing projects out of their own interest and need now. The decades that you contributed (thank you, BTW): were those all on projects you started, or did you also join some existing efforts?
I don’t see any reason to think that will stop in 10, 20, or 60 years.
Will there? I feel like most of the opensource attention flows gradually up stack / toward trendy things on github and away from infrastructure older than github. When heartbleed happened a few years ago it was revealed that OpenSSL was maintained by basically one guy. The same is true of the linux timezone database. Apparently python is mostly 2 people.
I'd put money on this being is a theme for lots of tools we take for granted. How many people work on bash? Or busybox, grub, libpthread or libicu? I bet the number is tiny.
People want to work on popular, useful things. Python is both of those.
Worse: they are exploiting people's good intentions.
They co-opted the Free Software movement.
Copyleft has been painted as "business-unfriendly" and replaced with permissive licenses - aka unpaid labor without "strings attached".
> They need to learn to pony up and start funding the "free" software they use
...instead they even dodge taxes.
This problem isn't solved by little old me pulling out my check book. My bank and my insurance company don't need charity from me in order to fund the technology they've built their businesses on. They need to learn to pony up and start funding the "free" software they use. Paying myself would only help kick the can down the road - and encourage and enable this sort of corporate mooching to keep happening.
In 60 years most of the volunteer maintainers of the software we depend on every day will be dead. Some time between now and then we need solution to this problem of opensource sustainability. Delaying buys us nothing.