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by wppick
596 days ago
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> Pretty much every big tech company you could think of uses some type of open source software, including Apple, Google, and Facebook. These companies contribute massively to open source. The article would have more impact if better examples were chosen. I think the model of open source works fine as is. Maybe people will write open source out of passion to work on cool project, and maybe to build a name for themselves. Companies will open source to give back, but also to get additional resources to help debug and build out the codebase. This just feels like begging for money. If you want to make money write sass software, don't corrupt open source |
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As a trade community, developers have come to treat open source projects as commercial vendors that they simply don't have to pay for -- they place support and roadmap demands on maintainers and regularly whip themselves up into a fury of frustrated entitlement when maintainers don't abide by those demands.
For passionate volunteers and part-time contributors, this dynamic is unsustainable and we've seen a continuously growing trend of maintainers burning out from the way they and their projects have come to be treated.
What we have now is not the vision of open source that many were fighting for 20 and 40 years ago. It's a bigger part of development than anyone back then could have imagined, but its mode of growth came with toxic consequences that erode the sense of camaraderie, enthusiasm, communalism, and good will that the whole effort was originally built upon.
We're on track for a collapse of open source, where mature, healthy projects figure out new ways to protect maintainers, largely by putting strict qualifiers on their licenses and making less and less stuff truly Free and Open.