The Open Source Sustainability Crisis
openpath.chadwhitacre.com
openpath.chadwhitacre.com
To take on and compete with the proprietary model, one must generate comparable revenues and attract similar levels of investment. The solution to open-source sustainability is straightforward: people pay for what they genuinely need. Commercial open-source excels in this aspect!
However, as you may know, it comes with its challenges. When a company profits from an open-source program, decision-making authority about what to implement or exclude lies firmly with that company, diverging from the open-source ethos. Yet, the real issue isn't the existence of a business model and revenue, but rather the absence of community control.
This underscores the importance of addressing the root of the issue. To enhance open-source sustainability, we must identify what currently works best and tackle its associated problems. This means embracing a commercial open-source business model while ensuring that decisions about the software aren't solely in the hands of a select few developers or corporations. Instead, a democratic approach should be embraced, where the user community plays a significant role in shaping these processes. Community control guarantees that the software evolves in a way that aligns with the needs and values of its users.
When was the last time you have submitted a patch to say PowerShell?
Democratic process does not exist when everyone is free to start a project. Users also often do not know what they want either until it's shown to them. Surprisingly also true when it's a tool made for other developers.
What you seem to be suggesting is to replace open source model with grant academia model if I'm being generous, and that would kill it. If I were less generous, you're suggesting to have say Microsoft tell OpenSSL devs what they want of them and do it.
Apparently do not have the same definition of "democracy". The definition that I use is more or less the Swiss system. At the top, a group of people that takes decisions that they think it is the best - and the people that have the power to override the decision if they organize a vote or propose a new law.
> What you seem to be suggesting is to replace open source model with grant academia model if I'm being generous Nope... Read what open-source-economy.com or tea.xyz - that is the future of OSS IMO.
I define this in the post as "Open Source subsidization, not sustainability."
https://openpath.chadwhitacre.com/2024/the-open-source-susta...
It's fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. It works for products, but it doesn't work well for libraries, frameworks, dev tools, and the like.
> donating is incredibly convenient nowadays
It's convenient to get started but not to scale. I run one of the foremost corporate Open Source donation programs (imo, obv):
https://blog.sentry.io/we-just-gave-500-000-dollars-to-open-...
GitHub Sponsors is very difficult to use at scale (100s or 1000s of deps). Thanks.dev is better but still has a lot of room to grow.
> addressing the root of the issue
Open Source is a common pool resource, and these are funded through collective social pressure, the limit case of which is taxation. More on this in a future post.
That is why we need to create an open-source ecosystem where projects that get paid redistribute to their dependencies. I have in mind 2 OSS ecosystems: open-source-economy.com and tea.xyz
This blog article, for example, explains how a bounty system could be beneficial for the whole ecosystem: https://www.open-source-economy.com/blog/make-open-source-fi...
I would be very curious to hear what you are thinking about those two projects. Spoiler: they are both in the early stage - and both use blockchain.
> More on this in a future post. Happy to read more about your vision!
There's also the other type of sustainability that has been shrinking as VCs make open-source a buzzword: contributions. I've seen more and more projects launch to great fanfare, and some years later close contributions, and perhaps even the issue tracker, because they are a small team. This leads to fragmentation, which leads to higher maintenance costs for the community as a whole.
Sure, the source is available, so a contribution to society has been made, but by doing so, you also become the "town square" where people expect to go to contribute. Perhaps the problem here is that the public VCS repositories should not only have PRs, but a list of contributed 3P patches without the expectation they will be merged, but they can easily be auto-tested against trunk, and patch authors be notified of breakages.
I'm an 'outsider', but from from the outside the Material For MkDocs Project looks like a very well managed open source project.
Martin Donath's project uses a 'sponsorware' release strategy to generate donations.
From my vantage point it seems to be working pretty well.
I consider this a case of "Open Source subsidization, not sustainability":
https://openpath.chadwhitacre.com/2024/the-open-source-susta...
Sustainability strongly defined means no hoops.
Isn't MkDocs an example of someone that's using a platform to good advantage?
The thing that impresses me about MkDocs is that it's a project that actually produces truly open source code, for donations.
And to some extend it also maintains that code for donations.
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The fatal flaw that I see in something like thanks.dev is that it will still suffer from the 'tragedy of the commons'.
That is, you cannot rely on the 'informed generosity' of your users.
That is, users will only give you money to 'solve a problem' for them, so maintaining your project has to be a problem for them.
[1] https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/insiders/
> it will still suffer from the 'tragedy of the commons'.
Fortunately, we have lots of great research on how to avoid tragedies of the commons:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521405998
I aim to explain how this applies to Open Source in a future post, which I'm tracking here:
That's definitely a challenge :-)!
I'm unfamiliar with the concepts of institutional analysis but definitely interested in learning more.
I'm also interested in the Functional Source License.
I'm skeptical though! I live in a country where corporations will literally make people work for food if they can. It's very hard for me to imagine how an open source project gives away the thing of value that it produces and only afterwards gets the money it needs to survive.
Solving the open source sustainability problem would actually be world changing.
For now I'm following you on Twitter and look forward to future posts.