However, I see a distinct lack of “geeks” in this initiative. Instead a lot of pol-sci majors that want to “manage” / claim developments they themselves would not have the skills to build.
Very few geeks have the skills (or even the desire) to build a financially sustainable open source project. The projects that are financially sustainable, are often tied to corporate ownership, often one of the FAANG. Still, the work to build the financial and community framework for such a project is often valued at close to, or even less than zero - as your comment shows. There's a lot of talk in the open source world about funding, or rather the lack thereof. Still, comments such as yours downtalk every effort people invest as profiteering of open source work. Wonder why no one wants to do that work - it's thankless, hard, undervalued and underappreciated, even by the ones that would profit of it - the people doing the coding. Your comment is doing all efforts to provide funding for open source projects a disservice.
But it should be done by persons that also have insight in the technical work. Otherwise problems of judgment cannot be avoided.
That’s the same in every profession by the way. You want to be head of the carpenters guild? Work as a carpenter for some time. Even if it is just carpentry as a hobby. You don’t like it as a hobby? Well, that says a lot already.
There is ample organization and leadership skill among the geeks. Look at the site you are on and its background. Many millionaire geeks...
Are any of those building and maintaining a successful open source project that is not commercially interesting to their company?
Paul Graham
Rasmus Lerdorf
The world is full of ‘em.
You don’t need one of those as the maintainer. They can also just hire somebody to do it for them.
But you do need some number of successful geeks in advisory roles to keep the political class on target when the funding is allocated.
And who are they going to hire? Someone with people skills and accounting skills. That doesn’t need to be a tech person.
“People skills” mostly are detecting the group consensus and running with it. Not the type of leader you need in tech.
Geeks are known to fight hard for their independent opinions. Especially when it goes against the group opinion. You need the willingness to do so - if required - from a leader ... so not a pure people person.
What is required though is being a good communicator. Most geeks learn that very fast. If properly taught...
Accounting can be hired for pretty cheap virtually everywhere on earth.
In many cases these bureaucrats destroy working projects for their own benefit (fame, power, salaries they would not get otherwise).
That isn't meant to say that funding is bad in all cases, but reflexively cheering whenever a new fund is announced is naive.
A lack of money also means that the pool of people working on public good (open source) projects self-selects to those that have the money to do that - and that’s limiting the pool and input into those projects.
I feel the same. Germany has a strong undercurrent of great open source developers and I hope the bureaucracy won’t come in the way of helping the geeks/hackers.