Maintaining open-source code is a vital but stressful job. Despite that, a recent Tidelift survey found that almost half of code maintainers aren't paid at all.
A lot more needs to be done to make a maintainer’s life easier, but paying them real wages for their real work would be a great place to start.
Which leaves the obvious question, who is going to do the paying. It certainly is not feasible to expect end users to pay the devs directly, especially considering how most projects are built on top of many libraries.
That leaves companies, but this can’t really work either as even though a few projects may find a fitting company as sponsor (i.e. said company uses the project as library), there are certainly tons of projects that can’t be tied to some company for sponsorship. And this is not even mentioning that for the most part there is no incentive for companies to sponsor a library even though it’s heavily used internally.
What does this leave? Well, the state, the taxpayers money. The way I see it open source software in today’s society is necessary infrastructure, just like streets or electricity. Open source software is a public good and so the public should fund it. I’d love to see states spending more money on it but I doubt it’s ever going to happen unless our society changes drastically.
But I guess a good first step is to inform non IT people and increase awareness on just how much our world relies on open source.
The article concludes with:
Which leaves the obvious question, who is going to do the paying. It certainly is not feasible to expect end users to pay the devs directly, especially considering how most projects are built on top of many libraries. That leaves companies, but this can’t really work either as even though a few projects may find a fitting company as sponsor (i.e. said company uses the project as library), there are certainly tons of projects that can’t be tied to some company for sponsorship. And this is not even mentioning that for the most part there is no incentive for companies to sponsor a library even though it’s heavily used internally.
What does this leave? Well, the state, the taxpayers money. The way I see it open source software in today’s society is necessary infrastructure, just like streets or electricity. Open source software is a public good and so the public should fund it. I’d love to see states spending more money on it but I doubt it’s ever going to happen unless our society changes drastically.
But I guess a good first step is to inform non IT people and increase awareness on just how much our world relies on open source.