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> Open Source is the ultimate form of sustainability. If the company that produces open source fails, the software doesn't have maintainers anymore. Unless som

> Open Source is the ultimate form of sustainability. If the company that produces open source fails, the software doesn't have maintainers anymore. Unless someone else picks up working on a possibly hugely complex piece of code, you will have an outdated, possibly full-of-secholes relic in no time. Software isn't static. So many open source projects have a funding problem. A single company pays the 5-15-50 developers it takes to keep it alive, build releases and so on, and then suddenly goes under or pulls funding. You can't just simply take over the mainenance of a large project at the snap of your fingers. The projects mentioned in the article are the exception, not the rule. The "community" doesn't typically come up with funding to the tune of several million dollars a year, nor does it have the know-how on all the details. If you need an example, take a look at the commit graph of the oVirt project [1] after Red Hat decided to sunset it. No forks, very little in the eay of new maintainers. Unless you want to risk it, you probably need to move off oVirt sooner or later. (Bias disclaimer: I worked on the Kubernetes/OpenShift integration for oVirt for ~2 years.) [1] https://github.com/oVirt/ovirt-engine/graphs/commit-activity https://github.com/oVirt/ovirt-engine/graphs/commit-activity

opensource4ever 3y ago
For sure, but this is infinity better than some close sourced project (like hardware driver, old iphone), where the user are stuck because the code is NOT open. What you are mentioning seems like a business and funding issue in general for software development. However, in now days and age everything (beside private key) ought to be open sourced. That is how a transparent work will work. And as we can lack of transparency has caused way more problem than problem such as oVirt project
- janosdebugs 3y ago
  I agree that it would be better to have the source code for things. However, what good is the source code if you don't know how to, or even worse, can't build it because it was always built using an intricate web of build systems that rely on servers that no longer exist? Can I patch and recompile the project on my computer and is it easy to find out how to do it? Do I even have the tools to build it freely available? Unfortunately, a great many open source projects fail this test.

opensource4ever 3y ago

For sure, but this is infinity better than some close sourced project (like hardware driver, old iphone), where the user are stuck because the code is NOT open. What you are mentioning seems like a business and funding issue in general for software development. However, in now days and age everything (beside private key) ought to be open sourced. That is how a transparent work will work. And as we can lack of transparency has caused way more problem than problem such as oVirt project

janosdebugs 3y ago
I agree that it would be better to have the source code for things. However, what good is the source code if you don't know how to, or even worse, can't build it because it was always built using an intricate web of build systems that rely on servers that no longer exist? Can I patch and recompile the project on my computer and is it easy to find out how to do it? Do I even have the tools to build it freely available? Unfortunately, a great many open source projects fail this test.