I think the article clearly states the problem: It encourages contributors to stop contributing and become "takers", and once there are not enough makers, the product and entire ecosystem dies. A classic tragedy of the commons.
Except software is infinitely reproducible once written. There's no tragedy of the commons if the commons' resources are infinte.
"But code needs to constantly change and update all the time! Who's going to do that!?" -- well, maybe that's the problem. Maybe if we want to make a real, lasting contribution to OSS, without being stuck maintaining it forever, we should focus on making software that doesn't have to change. Code is basically math, and we get lots of use out of polynomials and complex numbers and Galois theory without anyone actively "maintaining" them. Galois died in 1832!
Maybe the software we're writing is trying to do too much; maybe we should stop expecting perpetual updates and maintenance of OSS? Maybe a small, focused, reliable library that does one thing really well and never gets updated is actually the perfect OSS?
> maybe we should stop expecting perpetual updates and maintenance of OSS? Maybe a small, focused, reliable library that does one thing really well and never gets updated is actually the perfect OSS?
This is something that took some getting use to working with clojure. You'll hear it a lot, a lot of libraries are simply "done". They do their thing and they do it well. The language itself prioritizes not making breaking changes so there is rarely a need to "maintain" many libraries that were last updated years ago.
Habit still makes me pause when seeing it, but looking through the code will usually be reassurance enough or tell you that it was abandoned and needs work. There is also CLJ Commons[0] that takes useful/popular libraries that are done/mostly done and no longer maintained by the original maintainers. Usually the only changes are some performance updates with new JVM/Clojure features. Many of them are incredibly useful and haven't been updated in months or years.
It's definitely not a tragedy of the commons problem. Open source doesn't get used up by more people using it.
Takers actually have an inherent interest in supporting the open source software they use, in direct proportion to the long-term value they derive from it.
You actually need some countervailing force to have significant takers. E.g, with Wordpress I think there's an acrimonious and competitive relationship between the for-profit company controlling the open source project and one of the big for-profit users of the project.
The tragedy for OSS here is that an OSS project is being used as a lever in a struggle between business competitors over who gets the dollars. (I suspect WordPress was always designed and intended to support a commercial enterprise, though, so this kind thing was probably always going to be part of it.)
> once there are not enough makers, the product and entire ecosystem dies
Once there are not enough makers, willing to license products to corporations for free, the corporations either have to write their own software or die.
The “tragedy” as commonly interpreted is so wrong-headed and ill-framed. The problem at the heart of it was always the intermingling of private interests and common goods. The biggest problem with OSS is exactly that: private corporations can take those commons and get rich based on them.
So what is the tragedy? Really? It’s the tragedy of private interests. But it’s of course not named that because Economists championed The Problem. In turn we have to pretend that The Commons have a problem. Because Private Interests are axiomatic and are not to be questioned.
