this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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Free and Open Source Software
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Open Source as a concept is kinda similar to fanfiction. They are both technically just statements of fact, either they are or aren't, but both of them are very much intertwined with political "The big man can't control me" kind of zealotry. Which, at least for the anti-corporation parts of it all, I can respect.
But... OSS has a problem that fanfiction doesn't have: maintenance. With a fanfiction, it either gets finished, standing on it's own as a self-contained cake to be consumed and praised over, or the writer gets bored and the cake is unfinished. Either way, no person or business ever relies on that cake for their own goals, other than small personal satisfaction. It sucks when a writer leaves it hanging, but that's just how the cookie crumbles, and the consumer moves on to another work.
Open Source has to constantly update and expand to keep up with the technologies that it's connected to. And guess what, most all of the major OSS success stories rely on paid workers to keep things up with the times, and make those crucial integrations that keep the software usable.
Linux has many developers paid by their Big Tech employers to make stuff that they can use for their products without hassle somewhere down the line. Same with OpenStreetMap. Even worse with Android.
Does anyone here really think there would be enough maintainment on these projects to keep it at the stability and feature-improvement they are now if all paid work vanished tomorrow? I certainly don't. And unlike fanfiction, you can't truly just say "well, we're not updating it anymore", at least, unless you don't care about your whole use case and functional existence being replaced within a year, likely with a more-supported corporate alternative.
There are two and only two ways to keep Open Source supported well enough:
The first option violates the spirit of true open source much the same way as now, and the second one, actually, that'll happen... the day after the perpetual motion machine is invented, that is.
Reality hurts.
You're forgetting leverage. Open source is changing the way these businesses are forced to do business. And thats a start.
I can see one way that the first option would work. Back in the 1980s, the UK had a similar thing for artists, where they weren't required to produce specific works for the government, or were controlled by the government in any way. They just got the money so they could produce art. While there were definitely some abuses of the system, entirely because the government weren't really checking in on what anyone was doing with the money they got, it also led to a lot of successful artists who otherwise wouldn't have had the opportunity to just work on art, particularly working class artists. It's genuinely one of very few things the Thatcher government did that made the world better.
I'm very much a proponent of such a system existing again in the future. Essentially some form of unconditional income support for creatives, under the notion that their work is a social good that shouldn't be constricted by commercial incentives. I see no reason why that shouldn't apply to open source developers, since their work also benefits society as a whole. As long as the government remains hands-off in regards to what is made, and gains no rights to the work (ensuring that the open source software remains open source), it would in theory be more effective than relying on donations from the private sector. I suppose it still violates the spirit of open source, but it's also a model that has been successively used to support artists, who often share that "the big man can't control me" political leaning.
I disagree that the 2 options are the only ones available. We could have a funding system with aspects of quadratic funding and artistic freedom vouchers, which allows the organizations developing the software to remain private organizations. Quadratic funding is basically a public matching fund for contributions to public goods such as OSS with a special matching formula that matches small contributions from many sponsors at a higher rater than more concentrated ones