There was a pretty good discussion yesterday on this in the comments of a related article. I'll repost below my comment which summarizes the two articles I wrot

There was a pretty good discussion yesterday on this in the comments of a related article. I'll repost below my comment which summarizes the two articles I wrote, but I recommend checking out that thread, as it covers a lot of supporting and dissenting directions. → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30741702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30741702 Open Source volunteerism is the result of the early hacking culture and of what makes the Internet special: people choose to experiment and share their work, and their work can reach every corner of the world. It has no significant parallel in other industries, it's beautiful, and I owe it my career. However, it's not a sustainable, fair, or effective foundation for an industry with the responsibility to power modern society. We need the critical role of Open Source maintainer to professionalize. This is most likely to happen through capture by large intermediaries, but I wish to see it happen through the formation of a serious professional role, organized independently or in small firms, like lawyers. This will require changes both from the maintainers [1] (become legible, get a LLC, send real invoices, offer guarantees) and from companies [2] (pay the maintainers, pay them real money, pay for maintenance, and keep paying them). [1] https://words.filippo.io/professional-maintainers/ https://words.filippo.io/professional-maintainers/ [2] https://words.filippo.io/pay-maintainers/ https://words.filippo.io/pay-maintainers/