> Companies must stop expecting others to do their job for them. OSS devs already wrote the code for free because, ostensibly, it was fun
This is not really true. Open source is much more than hobbyists doing things in their spare time for fun. A huge amount of open source is developed by and released by paid software professionals as part of their jobs. Some of those companies are directly doing it as part of their actual business offering. Others are doing it because they value owning the mind share in a space. Then, a huge amount of other OSS is developed by people who want to enhance their professional reputations.
EDIT: I see the article actually confines itself to OSS software that was written as a hobby. In that case I think my words above are probably out of context. But by the same token, the whole article scope is diluted a lot. Yes, if you have pinned your project on something someone wrote on the weekend for fun with no intention to maintain it, you've got problems. But let's not brand all of open source with that problem.
It doesn't matter if it's written as a hobby project or not. People need to stop making assumptions and just expecting work to be done for free for them.
No wonder why maintainers burn out and companies are hesitant to open-source projects... random people come by and make demands with zero plans to pay for it.
I think the reality is, if its a hobby project supported by one person then money doesn't really solve it. No company should put itself in the position of being reliant on some random individual on the internet whether they are willing to pay them or not.
Of course, adopting this stance takes away opportunity for many small time open source projects to become popular in the first place, and the general incentive and opportunity for open source to succeed.
Money solves this by paying the original person or someone else to do what they need and provide the level of service and guarantees that they need. The whole point of open source is that it doesn't have to be the original developer.
I'm glad you brought this up. It's really core to the value of open-source as an activity. It creates the possibility for a project to become much greater than what it would have been if it was limited to the person or organization that originated it.
If one good thing can be said about the crypto sphere, it is that it is the only corner of the internet where nobody expects to get anything for free. Access is already gated by a wallet containing real money; you're going to use it. This leads to some surprisingly healthy dynamics around services and software that cost money to run but would be hard to charge for in web2.
> random people come by and make demands with zero plans to pay for it.
Perhaps we should then oppose the whole "hustle culture" which such attempts are part of (i.e. make demands without willing to pay, see whether they stick).
I generally advise my clients to mostly trust open source with lots of well known and documented professional eyes on it like reproducible builds of programming language compilers, standard libraries, and well maintained OS kernels.
Where I normally have them focus their resources is on the often thousands of dependencies that are, mostly, written has hobby projects by randos.
This is a thought-provoking take (as someone who really thinks open source devs have no obligation to their users). It is clearly possible to abuse that -- just dump the software necessary to use your product into open source ecosystem, abdicating responsibility while still technically supporting your product.
I dunno. I'd say that this still doesn't establish a customer/provider type obligation -- the open source code is still offered without any quality guarantees -- but it is entirely fair (and reasonable) to be extremely skeptical of a company that doesn't offer a contract-defined paid relationship for support.
These are all good reasons to contribute to free software but I think you've missed the biggest one of all, the fundamental engine that makes the entire concept work: making the software you already use, more useful. If you need a feature or a bugfix, you can write it yourself, upstream it, and never worry about it again. That's a big part of why companies employ people to work on free software, and it applies just as much to individuals.
And part of ostensibly "corporate" OSS is the stuff that devs convinced management to put out there because they didn't want someone else to reinvent that particular wheel. It might be supported for as long as it's used internally (and if you're lucky, some devs will continue unofficially supporting it for a while after that - but at that point we're already into de facto hobby territory).
This is not really true. Open source is much more than hobbyists doing things in their spare time for fun. A huge amount of open source is developed by and released by paid software professionals as part of their jobs. Some of those companies are directly doing it as part of their actual business offering. Others are doing it because they value owning the mind share in a space. Then, a huge amount of other OSS is developed by people who want to enhance their professional reputations.
EDIT: I see the article actually confines itself to OSS software that was written as a hobby. In that case I think my words above are probably out of context. But by the same token, the whole article scope is diluted a lot. Yes, if you have pinned your project on something someone wrote on the weekend for fun with no intention to maintain it, you've got problems. But let's not brand all of open source with that problem.