[werbel]

I'm not saying "open development" is not important but your message reads like its dismissive of people with different goals.

I'm a developer, I might create some tool for my needs and share it with others. I've got other income sources so there's no need for me to charge money for it. I just put it on GitHub as the easiest thing I can do to allow others benefit from it.

In some sense I would be open source developer. I don't care about "open development" though, I don't spend time pondering about software philosophy and its place in the world.

If there's a will to donate some money to me so I can justify spending some more time on the tool to make it more accessible in any way then I want the simplest way for both sides to facilitate the transaction.

Same goes for me being on the other side. I see a library I'd like to use, I believe author(s) made a good job, I'd like the library to be maintained, I want to pay for that with as little traction as possible. I don't care if the author created the library because he believes in "free software" or was simply bored and again, GitHub was the most convenient channel to share.

The same way I don't care what philosophy lies beneath music producer's work and what tools do we use while I'm paying him for his tutorials as long as it works for both of us.

[diggan]

That's fine and all. I'm not really involved in that side of things (consuming/producing open source libraries) and I think that side of open source is working fine, albeit it could be better (like most things).

What I'm mainly thinking about, is the running infrastructure. The live servers that are serving requests and providing a service to open source developers.

Some of these services are just nice to have.

Others are services we 100% depend on to get anything done nowadays.

The npm Inc registry is a good example. Imagine that the registry disappears tomorrow. Probably most JS developers would struggle until a alternative becomes clear and most people migrate there.

But just having the risk of having for-profit companies run these pieces of critical open source infrastructure, is a big risk for me as a open source developer.

This open source infrastructure is what I'm scared about, because we basically have no good solutions yet, for running open source infrastructure.

[werbel]

I understand that and that's why I haven't said there's anything wrong with your opinion or that I disagree.

Yes, we'd all love to have our tools (repository, package hosting, CIs, ...) both satisfying our needs and be free of whims of for-profit companies.

Some of us simply don't care that much as long as what we have now works and I just wanted to append that to the conversation.

That's why I only said that your message reads like... and not assumed you really believe the service is bad in overall just because it's bad within scope of one aspect that's close to your heart. :)

[diggan]

Thanks for clarifying! I do understand what you mean and agree as well.

In the end, different people will have different priorities :)