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0 pointsFiloSottile4y ago0 comments

The alternative is not the status quo. Look at all the talk of supply chain security from the big players. The alternative is that all power and profit is just moved to large institutional middlemen or directly to a few big companies who can afford such a program.

If you don't care about control over the downstream of your project, or funding, no one is forcing you to professionalize! I just want that to be available as an option to those who do.

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jka4y ago· 1 in thread

I worry that if the majority of open source contributors professionalize, then we're left with something that resembles top-down directed corporate work (and an absence of a lot of the freedom that draws people towards developing free and open source software in the first place).

Proprietary and corporate players are equally useless at securing their supply chains; I don't love that (from my perspective) they're now blaming and trying to coerce open source to become more like them to ostensibly fix the same problems they propagate themselves.

I'm not a security nihilist: I think improvement is possible. But in my experience, not many corporate managers or project sponsors ask for removal of features and reduction of attack surface.

jka4y ago

Anticipating a counter-argument: wouldn't individuals become the arbiters of the software functionality that is developed, if all open source software was based on a sponsor model? Isn't that more democratic?

Perhaps; some financial statistics that I'd suggest to consider would be:

- As of June 2018, U.S. households in the 0-40% income-level group had $0 median savings[1]

- From the same source: the median savings for a household in the U.S. is approximately $11k. There are approximately 120m households in the U.S. according to the U.S. Government census[2].

- As of 2022, thirteen firms from within the S&P 500 hold a combined $1 trillion in cash-on-reserve[3]

And yep, it'd be sensible to debate whether individuals or companies would be more likely to influence the direction of software; it's a disingenuous comparison to draw in that regard.

But even if we consider only individual citizens, there would still be significant disenfranchisement in dollar-voting ability.

[1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/27/heres-how-much-money-america...

[2] - https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/HSD410219

[3] - https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-compa...

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