5 korrents from this piece
Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.
Their wordsThis experiment started from the observation that despite being critical for the functioning of the Internet—and, by extension, the economy—the role of open-source maintainer has not yet found a sustainable manifestation.
Our reading
Foundations, on the whole, do not pay the maintainers of the projects they exist to support.
Their wordsVirtually all maintainers are either volunteers or full-time employees of large companies. Foundations on average don’t pay maintainers.
Their wordsVolunteerism is self-evidently not sustainable, as people’s life circumstances change.
Their wordsThis is how I frame it: if the effort required to replace or fork a dependency should it go unmaintained is measured in engineer-months, that’s a critical dependency and retaining its maintainers probably makes good business sense.
Their wordsAs a project gets more popular in the ecosystem, the workload increases but the value of that project for the company stays the same, so resources don’t increase accordingly.