After a quick read, my take on this. This basically says we need commercial software that companies pay for. It's just that people are so used to open source and developers have been banging on about how open source is good that no one really wants to admit that open source isn't all that good, we have the 1% of projects that everyone points to Linux Kernel, Kubernetes, etc but the reality is most open source libraries and applications are under-maintained. There are lots of battle tested well used production ready libraries that are being used by thousands of companies that have open issues and open pull requests and no one has even responded to. The whole "you can fix it yourself" is great until you realise that often means "you can fork it and fix it and maintain your own version"
Yeah - but having worked in many companies over the decades, ALL software is this way and most commercial software is even worse.
The difference is, you can’t fork and fix it yourself when it’s closed source from someone else. and a surprising amount of code running in every company it’s ‘someone else’s’ code even when it’s internal and part of the same company.
Then you're very lucky! I'd also question if you were thinking/discussing just the primary product, or also including various edge parts (like the library someone wrote years ago to deal with cleaning up old log data or whatever).
Even at the FAANGs I've worked at, it was pretty common for bugs to never get triaged or even looked at for long periods of time that impacted some users, or serious bugs that weren't in the critical path for common use cases to stay unfixed for years. Libraries that weren't actively 'owned' by anyone sometimes go even worse.
1. There are business that maintain open source software, today. That are paid maintenance. This can work for some cases. This can even work for libraries as some already do this.
2. Linux is a good example. There are legal organizations that surround it. From Linus to most of the contributors. People are paid for the work. Through legal organizations. With contracts involved. It's not an example of open source with volunteers doing the work out of the goodness of their heart.
3. Open source software can be great. But, just like an electrician doesn't just do electrical work in order to make a living... the same applies to open source software development.
4. There is a lot of open source maintained by companies that is not their core business value. This is reliable and production ready software. Sometimes people do make change requests to fix or improve these.
> 1. There are business that maintain open source software, today. That are paid maintenance. This can work for some cases. This can even work for libraries as some already do this.
This is true, but in my experience they end up complaining about the same thing. Competitors using their code to make money. Often this results in them becoming non-open-source, for example, Elasticsearch. I personally think the approach that Elastic has taken is the right approach and is what we should embrace instead of the whole open source is great and we should all do open source to help our careers.
> 4. There is a lot of open source maintained by companies that is not their core business value. This is reliable and production ready software. Sometimes people do make change requests to fix or improve these.
These are also often under-maintained.
> 3. Open source software can be great. But, just like an electrician doesn't just do electrical work in order to make a living... the same applies to open source software development.
I highly suspect the majority of them only do electrical work to make a living.
> Often this results in them becoming non-open-source, for example, Elasticsearch.
It's important to note that Elastic was a VC funded company that is now a listed public company trying to make open source maintainership their businesses as a high growth business. This is different from being a sustained maintainer making OK to decent compensation for their work.
The type of business matters. Is it high growth (or VC which is high growth) or is it consistent maintaining.
> These are also often under-maintained.
Sometimes they are and sometimes they are not. Are there any stats on this?
> I highly suspect the majority of them only do electrical work to make a living.
My point is that they don't ONLY DO electrical work. They have legal businesses, they do invoices, they handle accounting and money comes and goes, etc. They don't get to forget how businesses and finances happen while hoping for donations.
We should all embrace proprietary software? The approach Elasticsearch and other SaaS providers take is anti-freedom and inherently harmful to the "right to fork", which is precisely what makes open source more long-term sustainable and resilient than any garden-variety proprietary package.
Linux still has volunteers working on it, for 5.16 volunteers beat RedHat both by lines changed and changeset counts. Probably some of the (Unknown) people are also volunteers.
Keep in mind that a lot of Red Hat employees use their personal email addresses when committing to the kernel. It has always been allowed (though not necessarily encouraged), and many developers were involved in those communities before (or plan to be after) working at Red Hat, so they use their own email for continuity sake.
Especially if contributing to the kernel is something they only do infrequently rather than as part of their day job.
I believe that the LWN folks take that sort of situation into account, they don't just use the email address domain as an indicator of employer. And of course RedHat people probably do some Linux kernel work outside of paid time if they have pet issues unrelated to their RedHat directed time.
