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Comment by RodericDay | Hacker News Reader

> Unfortunately, in reality open source development is rife with problems and is ultimately unsustainable.

This is an absurd statement given the popularity and staying power of numerous open source projects.

Not "unsustainable" for the project or technology, "unsustainable" for the human(s) supporting the project or technology.

And that is exactly one of the reason of the opensource, to get more contributor.. (instead of releasing e.g. binaries..)

You'd be surprised how many contributors actually have a negative effect on the productivity of core developers. New contributors often require a fair bit of hand holding (just like any new contributor on a codebase, even internal ones) and are not necessarily aware of the general project direction, etc.

More contributors doesn't mean more productivity, and often means less, not more.

Especially since FOSS pretty much runs the web, and has only grown in scope since the 80s & 90s when it was birthed.

FOSS has its problems, yes, but it's shown staying power and growth so far. I'm not so sure it's ultimately unsustainable. Mind you, I've never been a maintainer.

The OpenSSL debacle shows how well it runs the web.

The Web was born out of NeXTStep, Solaris, HP-UX, Aix, Atari, Netware, Amiga and MS-DOS/Windows stacks.

*BSD and GNU/Linux came afterwards, picking up steam as most ISPs, many just handling a few neighborhoods, would rather use them for free (beer) than paying for UNIX or Windows NT licenses.

I disagree. BSD UNIX, created way back in 1977, was already dominant in Internet networking in those early web days circa 1991, hosting the majority of university web content in the early days of the web (early 1990s). And back then, university-hosted content was basically all the web.

Sure, strictly speaking, the web was born on NeXTStep, but it definitely was suckled on BSD UNIX, and to a lesser extent System V UNIX, some of the others you mention[1], and VMS (what I used to host web content in the early early days).

1. with the exception of MS-DOS/Windows, which didn't even have native TCP/IP support in those days.

Maybe in US, not in many European countries.

In Portugal, most universities were using Aix and DG/UX, no BSD in sight back then. I was there.

Around 1995 they started to slowly move to GNU/Linux, but many of those Aix, DG/UX servers only got replaced by GNU/Linux when the hardware died for whatever reason.

There were quite a few TCP/IP stacks for MS-DOS/Windows available, that many of us just bought.

He was talking about smaller two man project not founded by larger organizations. Those highly popular open source project are developed by people who are paid for it. Majority of small open source projects dies and have no funds.

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