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The Unpaid Backbone of Open Source: Solo Maintainers Face Increasing Security
- jqpabc123 2y agoMost projects are one overworked, undervalued, and nearly burnt out person. Bottom line: Giving your work away for free may be gracious and noble but it is not very viable or sustainable from a long term perspective. Hope and charity is not a really well proven business model for widespread adoption. The crazy thing to me is that most people in the world instinctively understand the economics involved here --- but not software developers for some reason. A large portion of whom religiously promote the idea that this is how most software should be done. Try to convince the least educated manual laborer to work for you without any agreed upon pay and they will just laugh you off. Most doctors and lawyers aren't engaged in a crusade to promote pro bono as the future of their profession. I think there must be a research thesis in this somewhere for some psychology grad student.