Let’s list 3 reasons people do open source and break down each one. 1. As a portfolio to get paid work - great! 2. Community cred - very dangerous - a recipe

Let’s list 3 reasons people do open source and break down each one. 1. As a portfolio to get paid work - great! 2. Community cred - very dangerous - a recipe for burnout as described in the article. Maintainers tend to over-extend themselves and there’s no resource allocation signals (no $$$ in other words) to right-size their efforts. Insisting on support contracts is a good mitigation as it allows $ to reflect effort, and difficult customers can be politely overcharged and/or fired. 3. For $$$ - futile due to human nature. It’s not rational to pay for something unless you can see the value - eg. why would anyone pay more tax than legally required? Therefore, sponsorships will only be taken up by the tiny minority who take a long enough view to see burnout and want to mitigate that risk for the good of all. But the majority will look at the immediate price of $0, see no future risk, and pay $0. And a small but vocal minority act in ways that burn out the maintainer, destroying their energy to the detriment of everyone. It’s not helped by our financial system, which almost demands that public companies act sociopathically. Marcan could’ve refused to support anyone without a support contract. And to provide signal about who's using too much support resources, limiting how much support you get on your contract is a great way to right-size things with dollars. On their struggles with merging Rust code into the kernel, let’s hope Linus can bang enough heads together. Rust has teething problems but the memory-safety it brings is a boon to security. Seeing Greg Kroah-Hartman weigh in and say the kernel devs have achieved tougher things in the past, I have faith. All is not lost - Marcan has so much love and time and energy invested, if the hostility can be reduced maybe they’ll come back.