Let’s say that that’s the problem. Who are qualified to solve it? American programming at least is centered around a few hubs where the programmers make great

Let’s say that that’s the problem. Who are qualified to solve it? American programming at least is centered around a few hubs where the programmers make great wages. They work for companies which make a lot, lot of money. Much of the complaining is about professional programmers who do OSS as a hobby. So none of the parties are lacking in resources. And no one is being coerced. I bring this up because some problems are about exploitation and coercion. Then the soft (unreliable) solution is about morality (don’t exploit), while the hard (reliable) solution is about laws and law enforcement. But Ethics doesn’t seem to be the appropriate domain. And not Philosophy in general. I’ve wondered for years now: where are the economists? This is a problem of assigning resources. It’s a problem of incentives. It’s a problem of dependable and proper bus-factored maintenance. Isn’t this a kind of problem that they are trained to solve? Concretely: you have an unreliable (volunteer, small) resource and large entities that rely on it. How do you bolster that resource? And I don’t mean in the vulgar sense of “give X and Y more money”. I mean: the current status quo is apparently unreliable, so how should things be organized in order to promote more reliability? That does not have to involve money. This isn’t some academic exercise. Real money is apparently on the line, indirectly. The stakeholders are powerful. Why can’t the relevant professionals solve this? Don’t get me wrong. I’m the kind of annoying person who believes that a lot of economics is mostly about propaganda. But how is this not a problem that economists can solve?