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Infrastructure has a bit of a tragedy of the commons thing going on. No one wants to pay for everyone else's infrastructure. So any software project that is i

Infrastructure has a bit of a tragedy of the commons thing going on. No one wants to pay for everyone else's infrastructure. So any software project that is infrastructure tends to suffer from lack of funding, whether it be proprietary software or open source. There are exceptions, naturally. E.g., PostgreSQL and SQLite, and Linux. To overcome the tragedy of the commons you need tons of interest and community. Everyone who contributes has to feel like they're getting their money's worth and that there's no better way. I.e., mindshare matters. Mindshare matters whether the thing is open source or proprietary.

pronlover723 4y ago
Is there any place there are actual statistics on this. Say the top 10k most used open source projects across languages where each project has the amount of money spent to maintain it / the number of people hours needed to maintain it and where the maintainers care to be remunerated? I really don't know which open source projects are under funded. Firefox, Python, LLVM, Clang, .NET, Chromium, Electron, VSCode are certainly adequately funded. There are also projects like some of my own that have a few 100 or 1000 users but I don't need/want funding for them. Maybe if they got 10k or 100k users and I actually got lots of support requests that would change. I'm sure there are several under funded projects but it'd be nice to see some qualitative data instead of just feeling it must be true.