I absolutely support and believe in the idea that maintainers of critical infrastructure should be paid for their time, but I also think that to move forward productively as a discipline, we need to hold what we release for "free" to a higher standard. - ThreadSky

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nicbarker.com • 47 days ago

I absolutely support and believe in the idea that maintainers of critical infrastructure should be paid for their time, but I also think that to move forward productively as a discipline, we need to hold what we release for "free" to a higher standard.

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nicbarker.com•47 days ago

I think it's reasonable to look to a section of our industry that manages to reasonably consistently release feature complete and documented software (i.e. video games), and recently I've been thinking that the steam model might work better than the github one for open source.

nicbarker.com•47 days ago

Steam, for all its faults, does have systems in place to incentivise quality - public facing aggregated reviews & scores from users, easily accessible tags and genre charts, an "early access" model specifically for partially complete software.

nicbarker.com•47 days ago

I also wonder whether github is missing an opportunity to offer paid software licenses (basically, an app store) alongside $0 open source, given that ends up being the pathway to sustainability for many long term FOSS maintainers.

nicbarker.com•47 days ago

I also think now that Microsoft owns Github there is a perverse incentive in place - as with every massive tech company, MS has made enormous profits off the back of open source work without proper compensation, and it's in their interest for things to stay that way.

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