In the case of Network Time Foundation, the nonprofit wrapper for NTP classic, the problem was largely mismanagement of funding. NTF funded Harlan Stenn's work on NTP, but funded no other developers. It did, however, fund a fundraiser and two part-time administrative staff. The two administrative staff came to one FTE (full-time-equivalent) total, and I forget how much the fundraiser was working. In any case, the org had funded more FTE in overhead than in technical staff.
By contrast, the temporary rescue team funded a project-manager-slash-information-security-officer, three developers, and a bright intern who did a great deal of documentation work. Granted, these were not all full-time positions, and I was able to lean on my parent organization for administrative support, so while paperwork was minimal I didn't have to fund it directly.
NTPSec's staff has varied over time, but at the time I stepped down to hand the ISO role off to my successor, they had the following funded positions: a project manager, an ISO, two developers, and a sysadmin-slash-developer. (Note: not all of these were full-time positions, and some were funded by third parties rather than by NTPSec directly.)
Open source infrastructure software projects, when well run, do not spend over half their resources on non-development work. It's just not responsible. It's how you lose donor confidence, and how you fail to maintain good software engineering practice even when you have the resources to do better.
This has been a running theme in open source failures in the last few years: "it will be better if we throw more money at it!". Sometimes this is true: there are developers out there simply burning out for lack of resources and splitting their attention between OSS work and making a living. However, often, there is mismanagement at work, or the project doesn't have a good enough talent pool to pull from to use funds effectively when they do get funds. I love when the problems are purely technical, because it's a clean fix and everyone thanks me and I walk away quietly. When the underlying problems are social, they tend to fester, because nobody really wants to be in the hot seat over the disagreements that happened.
That's quite the stretch, to claim that the two part time administrators is anywhere near half the value of a full time software engineer.
If you take average wages, two part time administrative employees would cost you somewhere around $40,000 a year (2 * 12 * 30 * 52, rounded up). One software developer's value is conservatively $120,000 a year (likely more; $80,000 salary, $40,000 payroll taxes & benefits).
By those estimated numbers (I'm not in a position to look up the actual numbers right now, but they're probably available), that's only around 25% for administrative overhead, for a three person team. Not that bad for a foundation. And certainly nowhere near "half their resources" as you claim.
I'm glad that NTPSec appears to be relatively well funded, but knocking on NTF for being less well funded and having administrative work that they don't want to pawn off on an already overworked developer is pretty nasty business.
By contrast, the temporary rescue team funded a project-manager-slash-information-security-officer, three developers, and a bright intern who did a great deal of documentation work. Granted, these were not all full-time positions, and I was able to lean on my parent organization for administrative support, so while paperwork was minimal I didn't have to fund it directly.
NTPSec's staff has varied over time, but at the time I stepped down to hand the ISO role off to my successor, they had the following funded positions: a project manager, an ISO, two developers, and a sysadmin-slash-developer. (Note: not all of these were full-time positions, and some were funded by third parties rather than by NTPSec directly.)
Open source infrastructure software projects, when well run, do not spend over half their resources on non-development work. It's just not responsible. It's how you lose donor confidence, and how you fail to maintain good software engineering practice even when you have the resources to do better.
This has been a running theme in open source failures in the last few years: "it will be better if we throw more money at it!". Sometimes this is true: there are developers out there simply burning out for lack of resources and splitting their attention between OSS work and making a living. However, often, there is mismanagement at work, or the project doesn't have a good enough talent pool to pull from to use funds effectively when they do get funds. I love when the problems are purely technical, because it's a clean fix and everyone thanks me and I walk away quietly. When the underlying problems are social, they tend to fester, because nobody really wants to be in the hot seat over the disagreements that happened.