Open source never made sense. It's really strange it ever existed. When I hear about talented people maintaining things like sudo for decades while the whole world makes money on the backs of your volunteering I'm always very confused.
It really is something that's hard to make sense of especially when we're so wired to exchanging money for goods and services, and our time and energy for pay.
That's why I read ESR's essays when I got hooked into hacker culture and it kinda makes sense.
Perhaps it is intuitive to think about it this way: Some people value reputation more than money. Sometimes reputation attracts money. So it's a win-win.
Hey, great read as alaways. What new models do you think open-source will need to survive the agent revolution? You really captured the challenge well.
I'm not sure what the new models would look like, if any -- but whatever it is, it'll have to be grounded on the goals and design philosophy of the OSS product. Meaning, people pay OSS maintainers not because they can provide consultation, expert advice, or premium/advanced documentation (all of these are forms of knowledge elicitation) but because they can trust that the OSS maintainers will steer the OSS product along a trajectory that aligns with their interests (e.g., corporation that uses the OSS product and heavily depends on it).
The latter model already exists -- corporations have long been sponsoring OSS projects that their product uses, so this is not really a new model.
Charity is another existing model, it's either based on good will or good PR. But this isn't really sustainable.
Maybe corporations lobbying to influence OSS project's goals and design philosophy will be a thing in the future? Hope not.
Open source never made sense. It's really strange it ever existed. When I hear about talented people maintaining things like sudo for decades while the whole world makes money on the backs of your volunteering I'm always very confused.
It really is something that's hard to make sense of especially when we're so wired to exchanging money for goods and services, and our time and energy for pay.
That's why I read ESR's essays when I got hooked into hacker culture and it kinda makes sense.
Perhaps it is intuitive to think about it this way: Some people value reputation more than money. Sometimes reputation attracts money. So it's a win-win.
Hey, great read as alaways. What new models do you think open-source will need to survive the agent revolution? You really captured the challenge well.
Thanks for reading!
I'm not sure what the new models would look like, if any -- but whatever it is, it'll have to be grounded on the goals and design philosophy of the OSS product. Meaning, people pay OSS maintainers not because they can provide consultation, expert advice, or premium/advanced documentation (all of these are forms of knowledge elicitation) but because they can trust that the OSS maintainers will steer the OSS product along a trajectory that aligns with their interests (e.g., corporation that uses the OSS product and heavily depends on it).
The latter model already exists -- corporations have long been sponsoring OSS projects that their product uses, so this is not really a new model.
Charity is another existing model, it's either based on good will or good PR. But this isn't really sustainable.
Maybe corporations lobbying to influence OSS project's goals and design philosophy will be a thing in the future? Hope not.