> It feels like we moved from a world where open source software was develop by a community, to one where most of us are just consumers of the code. Are you su

> It feels like we moved from a world where open source software was develop by a community, to one where most of us are just consumers of the code. Are you sure that's even a contradiction? I mean, if you start with a developer community, and add a lot of people who simply had not been exposed to / using the software, you get to the situation of "most of us being just consumers of the code". Now, you could argue that communities have been fraying/weakening over the past few decades, but that would be almost an orthogonal argument. > That mean that all the companies who have been relying on open source need to allocate time to community work. We need to funnel some social resources into building and maintaining such communities. If companies were to do that, then great, or rather, not great but sort-of-ok. The thing is, they aren't doing it, as they are fundamentally motivated not to: It hurts their profitability (except perhaps for vague extra-long-term concerns). So, it's not useful to say that "companies should do it".