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1. Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 18-Nov-2018 23:51:14 UTC Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
   The report on the sustainability of open source, written by Nadia Eghbal in 2016, identifies the problem well enough but doesn't have much of a solution.
   
   It's written from the venture capital perspective, so startup culture is uncritically endorsed and there are various other questionable assumptions about corporate involvement. In some places there are also references to the myth of the lone developer ("rockstar" type thinking).
   
   The problem it describes is that the current economy depends heavily on software and that underneath the glossy startups the infrastructure comprises largely of Free Software developed and maintained by a relatively small community of "key contributors". The software economy is mostly free riding upon the digital infrastructure base, and there isn't much systematic thinking about how to keep the infrastructure level going in the longer term.
   
   I'd describe this problem in terms of the failing social reproduction of developers. It might be easier than ever to learn python, but it can be hard to make ends meet while running a software project, even if it's vital to the free rider economy.
   
   It gives the classic example of OpenSSL - something which runs on the majority of internet servers and yet which in 2014 at the time of heartbleed was maintained by just one developer in precarious circumstances and hardly funded.
   • Adonay Felipe Nogueira repeated this.
   • Alonealastalovedalongthe (alonealastalovedalongthe@toot.cafe)'s status on Monday, 19-Nov-2018 00:18:59 UTC Alonealastalovedalongthe

     in reply to

     @bob I think the problem is less that open source isn't sustainable and more that our current infatuation with unrestrained capitalism is brutally unsustainable, and open source software along with basically everything else on the planet is a victim of this.

     It is vertigo inducing how much value is incorrectly perceived by our current economic model of reality.

     Adonay Felipe Nogueira repeated this.