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I think you have provided a very good list, but I think the list contains actual showstoppers. I know several OSS ecosystems where grants and commercial fundin

by t10q 8y ago

I think you have provided a very good list, but I think the list contains actual showstoppers. I know several OSS ecosystems where grants and commercial funding already destroy the original OSS spirit. You get a set of bureaucrats who control who gets to work on OSS and what is being worked on. Often they take the credit for the results. I think OSS should be result oriented: If someone can demonstrate that a piece of software he wrote is used widely, there should be a possibility of retroactive public funding. But results rarely count in the current OSS boiler room atmosphere.

sramsay 8y ago
> You get a set of bureaucrats who control who gets to work on OSS and what is being worked on. So I get that a grant necessarily defines some kind of who -- even if the money is given to "the project," it will ultimately boil down to a person or persons who is receiving funds to work on the project. And there's also a what, in the sense that there has to be some kind of boundary to what is being developed. But it sounds like you're thinking of scenarios in which the "what" isn't "working on OpenSSL" or "writing Git," but some more specific demand: paying someone to work on some particular feature or problem, as opposed to giving the project money and having the people on the project decide where to put their attention. Maybe there's no way around that. Maybe there's no practical way to define the "who" precisely, while leaving the "what" ambiguous.